Through the Brazilian Wilderness
1914
Through the Brazilian Wilderness is the account of a man who had commanded armies, ruled the most powerful nation on earth, and then found himself crawling through the jungle with a flesh-eating infection, begging his son to leave him behind to die. This is Theodore Roosevelt's own gripping narrative of the 1914 expedition that nearly killed him. After losing his 1912 presidential campaign as a third-party candidate, Roosevelt accepted Brazilian explorer Candico Rondon's invitation to help map a remote Amazon tributary known as the River of Doubt, or River of Death, as the men would come to call it. What began as a scientific survey became a desperate fight for survival. The expedition lost men, canoes, and supplies to ferocious rapids. When Roosevelt contracted a devastating infection that left him too weak to walk, he faced the grim reality that he might never leave the jungle. Yet he did. Roosevelt emerges from these pages not as the former president but as a man stripped to his rawest self, dependent on his son's devotion and his own iron will. It is adventure writing at its most visceral, a window into a vanished age of exploration, and a portrait of courage under conditions that would have killed most men.
