The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

“Of course a man has to take advantage of his opportunities, but the opportunities have to come,”

“If there is not the war, you don’t get the great general; if there is not the great occasion, you don’t get the great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in times of peace, no one would know his name now.”

“These men said that where they had been working the sun never shone, for his light was stopped on the unbroken green which, except where the big rivers flowed, roofed the whole land.”

Roosevelt lived during the last days of the golden age of exploration, a time when men and women of science roamed the world, uncovering its geographical secrets at a breathtaking pace

“All for each, and each for all, is a good motto,” Roosevelt had once written, “but only on condition that each works with might and main to so maintain himself as not to be a burden to others.”

They also reflected the profound impact of that evolutionary competition on all forms of life in the Amazon, where it has produced some of the most phenomenally diverse and specialized plants and creatures anywhere on earth.

If Roosevelt had been able to see the rain forest from a distance, he could have watched it breathe.

Roosevelt had never allowed himself to fear death, famously writing, “Only those are fit to live who do not fear to die.”

“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.”

“Never before in my life has it been so hard for me to accept the death of any man as it has been for me to accept the death of Theodore Roosevelt. A pall seems to settle upon the very sky. The world is bleaker and colder for his absence from it. We shall not look upon his like again.”