The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

“I know the American people,” he had said prophetically in 1910, upon returning to a hero’s welcome after an epic journey to Africa. “They have a way of erecting a triumphal arch, and after the Conquering Hero has passed beneath it he may expect to receive a shower of bricks on his back at any moment.”

As in the development of a modern economy, with its ever-increasing specialization of labor and markets, each increase in competition among the inhabitants of the rain forest has itself been a powerful source of further speciation, rewarding entrepreneurial variations of life that can exploit skills and opportunities that previously went unrecognized or did not exist.