Don Ready’s Reviews > The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey > Status Update

“I have always thought it strange,” Cherrie said quietly, “since I had the opportunity to know him and know him intimately—because I feel that I did know him very intimately—how any man could be brought in close personal contact with Colonel Roosevelt without loving the man.”

Excerpt From
The River of Doubt
Candice Millard

“…he continued to fight, refusing to bow to the sorrow and grief that he had outrun his entire life. “When the young die at the crest of life, in their golden morning, the degrees of difference are merely degrees in bitterness,” he had written to his sister Corinne. “Yet there is nothing more foolish and cowardly than to be beaten down by sorrow which nothing we can do will change.”

“The forest of the Amazons is not merely trees and shrubs. It is not land. It is another element,” he wrote. “Its inhabitants are arborean; they have been fashioned for life in that medium as fishes to the sea and birds to the air. Its green apparition is persistent, as the sky is and the ocean. In months of travel it is the horizon which the traveler cannot reach.”

H. M. Tomlinson

“after he and his companions had spent months in the Amazon rain forest, ”something began to go wrong in us. Coming daily into such close contact with the virgin forest we found, as so many other white men had found before us, that its grotesque forms and brilliant colours got on our nerves like a nightmare. It was stifling us; the whole exotic jungle became one gigantic cauldron of hatred and brutality.”

“In fact, he claimed that 90 percent of the Indian attacks that took place in Brazil were nothing more than acts of self-defense and retaliation. The idea that Indians might attack the expedition for reasons of fear or self-defense offered little comfort to Roosevelt, who noted wryly, “If you are shot by a man because he is afraid of you it is almost as unpleasant as if he shot you because he disliked you.”

“Although he rarely devoted more than a single sentence in his journal to the death of one of his men, Rondon penned heartfelt eulogies to his dogs. After his dog Vulcão died, for instance, he wrote, “Travel companion who guarded my tent…Poor companion! How I feel your death….You who served me so well, without my being able to pay you back for half of your dedication.”

Excerpt From
The River of Doubt

“The softer the rock, the more easily it erodes, exposing bars of hard bedrock that form ever-steeper steps in the riverbed, making the water roil and churn as if a fire were blazing beneath it. The Madeira, which starts its journey near the Bolivia-Brazil border in the Brazilian Highlands, has at least thirty major waterfalls and rapids, with sixteen powerful cataracts in one 225-mile stretch alone.”

“The Nhambiquara were taller and darker than the Pareci, with longer heads and hair cut into distinctive bowl-like bangs….Kermit liked them. They are “a very pleasant set,” he wrote Belle, “and didn’t look at all as if they had given Rondon all the trouble they have. They have small hands and feet, and really nice faces. It’s melancholy to think how they will change when civilization comes here.”