State of Denial or River of Doubt

State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III

Author: Bob Woodward

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River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

Author: Candice Millard

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt's harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.

The River of Doubt-it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.

After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil's most famous explorer, Cвndido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.

Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.

From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rain forest to the darkest night of Theodore Roosevelt's life, here is Candice Millard's dazzling debut.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review - Bruce Barcott

Although The River of Doubt sheds new light on one of the more exciting years in Theodore Roosevelt's life, bookstore clerks ought not to shelve it under biography. In her debut book, Millard, a former writer and editor for National Geographic, combines high adventure well told with dazzling passages of nature writing that illuminate the darkest, steamiest sections of the Amazon forest.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

… The River of Doubt is not an ordinary biography. Its author, Candice Millard, is a credible historian as well as a former writer and editor for National Geographic. She pays keen attention to nature, human and otherwise, in this vigorous, critter-filled account of Roosevelt's last epic journey: a white-water voyage through the Brazilian rain forest and the deep unknown.

The Washington Post - Shah Tahir

Roosevelt pulled through, and The River of Doubt reminds one of the man himself -- thorough, robust, extremely knowledgeable and triumphant. There are far too many books in which a travel writer follows in the footsteps of his or her hero -- and there are far too few books like this, in which an author who has spent time and energy ferreting out material from archival sources weaves it into a truly gripping tale.

Publishers Weekly

Ferrone's gravelly, stentorian, hushed voice sounds downright presidential in reading the story of this little-known event from ex-Commander-in-Chief Theodore Roosevelt's postpolitical life. After losing his third-party run for the 1912 presidential election, Roosevelt agreed to accompany a Brazilian explorer on a trip along the Amazon, hoping to map the river's uncharted path. Expecting an uneventful trip, Roosevelt and his party barely managed to escape with their lives. Ferrone adopts a strange tone when providing Roosevelt's voice, attempting to echo his famously brusque boom and sounding oddly strangled in the process. His reading is on steadier ground in conveying the sweep of Millard's prose, uniting the personal drama of the Roosevelt family with the naturalist investigations of the voyage. Ferrone carries the narrative along on the waves of his own raspy, gruff instrument, shuttling readers through Millard's book with a steely self-assurance reminiscent of its subject. Simultaneous release with the Doubleday hardcover (Reviews, July 11). (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Whenever fate dealt him a blow, Theodore Roosevelt struck back by taking on a new physical challenge. Millard, formerly with National Geographic, charts how TR dealt with his "third term" loss for the White House in 1912: he accepted a lecture invation to Buenos Aires and followed it with a dangerous expedition deep into the Amazon in search of a remote tributary known as the River of Doubt. Millard's book has four central characters, each vividly brought to life: the 55-year-old ex-president; the celebrated Brazilian explorer Col. Candido Rondon; TR's 24-year-old second son, Kermit; and the Amazon rain forest itself, which nearly doomed the two dozen members of the expedition. From the outset, the three men had different goals. For TR it was his "last chance to be a boy" and to become a genuine explorer, for Rondo it was an opportunity to survey properly the river he had discovered in 1909, and for Kermit it was a duty to his mother, who worried about her aging husband. The expedition encompassed miles of impassable rapids, loss of canoes and supplies, malaria, near-starvation, cannibalistic Indians, deadly snakes and insects, and a murderous porter. Millard turns this incredible story into one that easily matches an Indiana Jones screen adventure. Essential.-William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The 26th U.S. president, failing re-election, has an adventure that nearly kills him. In an admirable debut, historian Millard records Theodore Roosevelt's exploration of a hitherto uncharted river in the heart of the Mato Grosso. A confluence of circumstances, including a South American speaking tour and the eagerness of others to investigate the Amazonian headwaters, brought Teddy, aged 55 and still bold and plucky, to Brazil, then largely unmapped and unknown. When the opportunity came to change a planned route to follow the uncharted course of the ominously named River of Doubt, the former chief executive seized it eagerly. And so, with devoted son Kermit and truly intrepid Brazilian co-commander Candido Rondon, along with a band of hardy recruits, the party plunged into the fierce, fecund jungle and its unknown dangers. (It's an exploit that standard TR biographies generally treat lightly, if at all). With heavy, useless equipment and inappropriate provisions, the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition ventured into the luxuriant wilderness where every life form threatened. There were pit vipers, piranhas and tiny fish that attack where a man is most vulnerable. There were poisonous plants, malevolent insect swarms and native warriors, ever present and never seen. The beefy former president must have embodied some prime cuts for the cannibals as he sat in his canoe. Eventually Colonel Roosevelt was downed by injury and fever. He ended his journey emaciated at three-quarters of the weight he started with on the watercourse now found in atlases as the Roosevelt River. Millard tells the story wonderfully, marshaling ecology, geography, human and natural history to tell the tale of the jungleprimeval, of bravery and privation, determination and murder in the ranks as cowboy Roosevelt survived the Indians of the Amazon. Teddy Roosevelt's tropical adventure, splendidly related.