Mornings on Horseback over The Great Bridge

Shannon picked me up a pair of David McCullough books from the library a while ago.   I'd read and enjoyed 1776, and he's all sorts of famous (for a historian) so I was reasonably interested.

I started with The Great Bridge, which is about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.  First off, I want to say that I don't think it's the most famous bridge in the world, as is often claimed.  You can feel free to disagree, but if you do, I ask: What does it look like?  Then I say: what does the Golden Gate Bridge look like?  The latter is the most famous bridge in my brain.  Anyway, they decided to build a bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan, so people didn't have to take ferries which could be stopped by fog or ice.  But, before you can start building a bridge, you have to talk about building a bridge, and politicians have to get involved, and form a bridge company, and bribe various people.  And all of that is very boring.  The other thing that you need to do is spend a few dozen pages on the life history of the designer of the bridge, even if (spoiler alert) he dies before the construction even starts and his son builds the thing.  So, I found the book to be very slow starting.  However, I pressed on and after 150 pages or so, the started building the bridge and it got a lot more interesting.

It is truly impressive what we (humanity) managed to accomplish without calculators or any technology more complex than a steam engine.  The foundation for the bridge on the Manhattan side goes down something like 100 feet below the river and the bridge spans over 1500 feet.  I wish the book had more pictures, particularly of the finished bridge.  I realize that photography from the 1870s isn't the easiest thing to come by, but even pictures from a few decades later would still have shown the bridge in it's "original" state fairly well.  If you really want to know more about the bridge, the book will certainly do the job, but I'm not suggesting you all run out and buy a copy.

Keeping with the late 1800s New York City theme, I then started on Mornings on Horseback which is about Teddy Roosevelt.  I suppose at some point in his childhood Teddy Roosevelt must have ridden a horse in the morning on a somewhat regular basis.  I wouldn't know, because I didn't make it that far in the book.

I suppose the point of the book was to understand what made Roosevelt the way he was by understanding his childhood.  But frankly, his childhood isn't interesting enough to go through at a rate of 50 pages per year.  The Roosevelt's were very wealthy, so they did stuff like spending a year touring Europe, or a summer going up and down the Nile.  The kids didn't go to school, but had private tutors.  Young Teddy (called "Teedie" by his family, probably because his dad was also Theodore) suffered from asthma, which was no fun.  It's not that any of this was inherently boring, but I didn't find it engaging enough to dwell on for as long as McCullough did.

I made it 140 pages in before giving it up; reading was too much of a chore.  Life is short and books are many.  These come out as pretty poor reviews of Mr. McCullough's work, which makes me feel kinda bad.  I think the issue is more with the choice of topic rather than the writing.  If you asked me out of the blue if I thought Teddy Roosevelt's childhood would be an interesting topic for a book, I'd say "no".  But then when you say that David McCullough thinks it's interesting enough to write hundreds of pages about, it gets me thinking maybe there is something interesting there.  I don't doubt that he finds it interesting.  I, however, don't.  Same thing with the bridge, though to a much smaller degree.