Colonel Roosevelt

His celebrated charge up San Juan Hill made him an American icon - a roughshod, take-charge leader in the glorious service of his young and ambitious nation. For Theodore Roosevelt, it was a defining moment, the scene with which he would become most often associated. And, as H. Paul Jeffers shows in this lively new account, the now-legendary episode not only made the future president's political career, it took center stage in a "splendid little war" that Roosevelt himself orchestrated almost single-handedly. Colonel Roosevelt is an exciting and thoroughly captivating portrait of a man and a country at a crossroads. The Spanish-American War of 1897-1898 was the shortest conflict in American history. Yet it played a pivotal role in propelling the United States onto the twentieth-century world stage - along with the man whose nationalistic and military ideals were most responsible for bringing it about. With his keen eye for characterization and rich period detail, Jeffers captures the spirit of a newly industrialized nation with dreams of the spoils of empire hitherto reserved for her European rivals, a country flexing her newfound muscles.