A review of Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands: A Young Politician’s Quest for Recovery in the American West for High Country News.
This book is autobiography amended, expanded and explicated, replete with buckskin, bar fights and encounters with boat thieves. But Di Silvestro transforms the pulp of the classic Western adventure into a richly textured document that helps the reader understand the deep respect afforded to Roosevelt — evidenced by the fact that in the spring of ’85, when he disembarked from the train in Medora, N.D., still wearing his Eastern “city garb,” nobody shot the derby hat off his head.