The New York Times Book Review - Jean Zimmerman
Teddy is a fraught choice for biographical treatment these days, a trustbusting conservationist who was also a big-game hunter with a dubious view of racial equality, appearing almost buffoonish behind his pince-nez and buck teeth. But Charyn's empathic first-person strategy keeps the tone sprightly positive, undercutting the braggadocio with paradoxical self-deprecation.
Larry McMurtry
"Jerome Charyn has long been one of our most rewarding novelists, and he has upped the ante in The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King, his frolic about Teddy Roosevelt in the West."
Mary Ann Gwinn
"Charyn captures Roosevelt’s doubts, aspirations and ebullient spirit.... A lively, warts-and-all portrait of an irrepressible man."
William Giraldi
"Jerome Charyn is a one off: no other living American writer crafts novels with his vibrancy of historical imagination. If you think his novels about Dickinson and Lincoln are virtuosic works of art, The Cowboy King will astonish you anew. Here is Teddy Roosevelt as you’ve never before experienced him, and as you won’t soon forget him."
Keir Graff
"Marked from beginning to end by restlessness and adventure.... A ripping, enjoyable yarn."
Gerard Helferich
"Graced with vivid, vigorous writing.... [Charyn] has written the rousing yarn advertised in his title and dust jacket, and he has written it well."
Ron Charles
"Who wouldn’t want to grow old like Jerome Charyn? Now in his 80s, the prolific writer seems ever more daring. Charyn has found a path all his own — neither a substitute for biography nor a violation of it.... For fans of Roosevelt, this is tremendous fun.... One of the melancholy pleasures of this novel is the contrast it continually presents to our current president. The reviewer’s handbook says I’m not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but I have to offer some praise for this unusually witty dust jacket. It strikes just the right tone, as does this delightful novel."
Brenda Wineapple
"No one rewrites America's strange history— or its maverick characters— with more flair, sharp-shooting wit, and compassion than the many-sided Jerome Charyn. And in The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King, he's done it again: he's written a raucous, poignant, charming novel about a raucous, poignant, charming Teddy Roosevelt, a man of his time, and ours. Don't miss it."
Joyce Carol Oates
"Warning: don't turn to the first page of Jerome Charyn's remarkable new work of fiction The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King unless you have time to be utterly swept away for the next ___ hours."
Comics Grinder
"For TR, Mr. Charyn pulls out the stops offering up the man in his own voice, a magnificent mashup of macho and aristocrat.... Cowboy King is a novel at its best: engaging, immersive and compelling."
Jean Zimmerman
"Undeniably, a marvel.... Charyn’s empathetic first-person strategy keeps the tone sprightly positive."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2018-10-02
A rendering of Teddy Roosevelt's early life that spotlights formative moments in colorful, entertaining episodes.
The young boy saw a werewolf near his bed at night when an asthma attack came on. As Teddy narrates, his father would order up "the Roosevelt high phaeton with its pair of long-tailed horses" and let the wind fill Teddy's lungs in thrilling rides on the "scorched plains of Manhattan's Upper West Side." He was the youngest man in the state Assembly, where he says he wore "a pince-nez with a gold tassel, and a peacoat from my Harvard days." When he lost his mother and wife within hours of each other, he fled west, to Dakota territory, "with silver stirrups, a tailored buckskin suit, and a Bowie knife from Tiffany's." But he's pulled back to New York, where he becomes a police commissioner fiercely disliked for his blue laws and anti-corruption drive. He's rescued from a melee at the Social Reform Club by his new squad of bicycle cops, whose leader will join him in Cuba. Before Charyn (Jerzy, 2017, etc.) ends with President William McKinley's assassination, he gives the Rough Riders a big slice of the book not just for TR's famous hill charge, but for the reluctant leader who could scrounge for his troops and suffer whatever the men suffered—though he also had a tent from Abercrombie & Fitch. The prolific Charyn has written scripts for graphic books. With TR, there's a sense of the outsize characters of 19th-century dime novels, though without the hagiography. Roosevelt embodied contradictions—a privileged reformist, a cowpoke from Manhattan, an honest politician—and his private life was riddled by strife and loss.
Charyn makes artful use of historical fact and fiction's panache to capture the man before he became one of the great U.S. presidents and a face on Mount Rushmore.
