I'm sorry not to get back to From Colony to Superpower, although I don't have as interesting a reason as Rob Farley does; I don't suppose he uses bookplates.

But I think this leaves me a little more time to get my reading in gear; my initial reaction to Chapter VIII, in which Herring covers the Theodore Roosevelt Administration (and a few words on Taft) is that our author has thrown his notecards at the chapter with no particular concept of how they should come down. He begins by defending American exceptionalism; he considers American philanthropy real, and quotes no less an authority than the Empress Dowager to the effect that Americans may be barbarians, but they've always been very kind. (Why does a qualified historian believe her? This is patently a return of thanks for a charitable donation, and royalty has always been very good at saying nice things about people who are handing them money.) He ends by revealing the unsurprising truth that the Open Door and  the return of the Boxer Indemnity both served the narrow interest of the United States.

Herring bends a few notecards in the process: He cites a quote late in the chapter as being from "Finley Peter Dunne's character Mr. Dooley". Oddly enough, at the beginning of the chapter, he cites the much better known crack that TR should have called his Cuban memoirs Alone in Cubia, Herring simply identifies the author as "a wit". I grew curious, and looked at the source in his footnote (neither footnote cites Dunne), and found it was this newspaper column. It took me a while, because Herring misspelled the author's name, and ascribed it to the wrong newspaper; but the weirdest thing is that it doesn't contain the joke.

I should return to Chapter VII, and Flint's Fleet next; it's too fascinating a story, and Herring tells too litlle of it, to omit.

Added: on reviewing the chapter, I find it is worse than this. Herring also cites Mark Twain only at second hand, and he does not mention Twain's take on the Phillipine War at all, even to refute it. He cites one Twain quote from Ken Burns; has he read Twain himself?

Is this what it takes to be a major historian?  No, there is one feature which will keep Herring from being James Ford Rhodes or Ron Chernow; he has a regrettable habit of writing intelligible, grammatical, and (occasionally) witty English. He will never be a best-seller.