The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey

by Candice Millard

Roosevelt sought comfort and distraction in the world that he knew best: his library. For his trip to Africa, he had spent months choosing the books that he would take with him, ordering special volumes that had been beautifully bound in pigskin, with type reduced to the smallest legible size, so that the books would be as light as possible. Roosevelt, Kermit wrote, “read so rapidly that he had to plan very carefully in order to have enough books to last him through a trip.” He had not had that luxury when preparing for his South American journey, however. “The plans for the Brazilian expedition came into being so unexpectedly that he could not choose his library with the usual care,” Kermit noted. Among the books that had made it onto the dugout canoes for their river journey were Thomas More’s Utopia, the plays of Sophocles, the last two volumes of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. “These and many others comforted me much,” Roosevelt wrote, “as I read them in head-net and gauntlets, sitting on a log.”