This week in Bedtime Biographies — one president who refused to fall down, one classic in a brand-new edition, and the Finnish architect who taught cold modern buildings to bend around people.
Featured biography: Theodore Roosevelt — The Boundless Spirit
On October 14, 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest on his way to give a campaign speech in Milwaukee. The bullet passed through his steel eyeglass case and the folded fifty-page speech in his pocket — and Roosevelt, coughing once to check for blood, went onstage anyway and talked for more than an hour with the bullet still in him. “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose,” he told the crowd.
He was born on October 27, 1858 — his birthday lands this coming week, and this year the National Park Service marks it with a fee-free entrance day at every park that charges admission. Fitting, for the president who protected some 230 million acres of public land. The Boundless Spirit follows the whole improbable arc: the asthmatic boy who built himself into a cowboy; the police commissioner, Rough Rider, and youngest president in American history; and the irrepressible elder statesman who charged into the Amazon and nearly died there, a decade after leaving the White House.
Three things you didn’t know about Theodore Roosevelt:
He was secretly blind in one eye. A boxing match in the White House detached the retina in his left eye; he quietly switched to jiu-jitsu and never told the public.
The teddy bear is named for him — after he refused to shoot a bear cub that had been tied to a tree for him on a 1902 hunt, cartoonists turned the moment into a toy that outlived the presidency.
He read, on average, a book a day — often two or three — including at meals, and wrote more than thirty of his own.
Read or listen to The Boundless Spirit:
📱 Ebook — $3.99 on Payhip: https://payhip.com/b/Mchy2
🎧 Audiobook — $9.99 on Payhip: https://payhip.com/b/2aBd4
🎁 New here? Get The Life of Elon Musk free with code FREEMUSKBOOK: https://payhip.com/b/lSjLs
New release: Alvar Aalto — The Wave Maker
Our newest biography is here. Alvar Aalto — “aalto” is Finnish for wave — built a sanatorium around its weakest patients, a library with a ceiling that rolls like water, and a vase that still sits on a million tables. While the other modernists worshipped the machine, Aalto bent wood, brick, and light around the human body. This is the life of the architect who made modernism warm.
📱 Ebook — $3.99 on Payhip: https://payhip.com/b/4CZEA
🎧 Audiobook — $9.99 on Payhip: https://payhip.com/b/itK4C
🎧 Also on Curios, Chapter 3 free to preview: https://www.curios.com/c/WD55G2
📖 Paperback on BookSpace: https://bookspace.com/bedtime-biographies/alvar-aalto-the-wave-maker
Classic of the week: Henry David Thoreau, in a new edition
Our Thoreau audiobook has just been rebuilt from the ground up — re-leveled second by second so the quiet passages stay quiet and nothing jumps. If you tried it before and the volume wandered, this is the version to hear. Walden in autumn is the right season for it.
🎧 Audiobook — $9.99 on Payhip: https://payhip.com/b/7OPGW
🎧 Also on Curios, Chapter 3 free to preview: https://www.curios.com/c/WAMMX1
Bundle spotlight: The Architect-Designers of the Modern World
Five architects, five countries, one century that changed how humanity lives — Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Antoni Gaudí, Oscar Niemeyer, and Alvar Aalto — in one collection, new this week:
📱 5-eBook Collection — $12.99 (save $6.96 vs. buying separately): https://payhip.com/b/Oj7co
🎧 5-Audiobook Collection — $34.99: https://payhip.com/b/NGK68
Also in the store: The Pioneers of Science & Logic — Newton, Darwin, Tesla, Turing, Lovelace, and Hawking — $14.99 ebooks / $39.99 audiobooks: https://payhip.com/b/Dyhnj
Coming soon
On the workbench: Eli Whitney and his cotton gin, then Samuel Morse and the telegraph that shrank the world. And a date to circle: a Van Gogh painting unseen in public for sixty years goes to auction in New York this November — we’ll have a letter worthy of it when the hammer falls.
Browse the full collection at the store: https://payhip.com/BedtimeBiographies
And everything lives at https://www.bedtime-biographies.com/
Thanks for reading. Hit reply anytime — it comes straight to me.Happy reading,
Jamie Glick
Bedtime Biographies