River of Doubt
Recently finished Audible’s unabridged take on River of Doubt:Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard. I just took a peek back at the overall ratings currently posted at Audible (where it sits at 4.5 stars out of 5) and I have to agree with the high rating. This was a great book.
The story is of Roosevelt (and various others) taking a trip down a previously unexplored 1,000 mile long tributary of the Amazon in 1914 after his frustrating defeat running for president on the progressive ticket. The story eloquently exposes the personalities of these men, as they spend difficult months braving one of the last uncharted parts of the world at that time. Hopefully it’s not a spoiler that they (mostly) survived.
I found two things of particular interest while reading the book:
1) The side stories about (Roosevelt’s son) Kermit
2) The view of Roosevelt himself was very different than I had expect it to be
The first part: Kermit. I found Kermit throughout the book to be portrayed as a strong yet sensitive young man… one with a bright future ahead of him, etc. I even got impatient part way through the book and looked him up at Wikipedia to see if he became a senator eventually, or “merely” a representative in his later successful life. Well, if you follow that link you’ll find that he became neither. Instead, he became an alcoholic, moved to Alaska in desperation/depression, and eventually committed suicide in 1943. Ouch! Not at all what I had expected, and it made me sad!
The second part: TR. I guess because he’s described as having run on the progressive party and he’s often described as a “progressive”, I’ve always sort of pictured him as a turn of the century Thom Hartmann. That would be wrong, I think.
It turns out that, as much good as he did for middle-class, unions, etc… at heart he was possibly a lot more like George W Bush than I’d ever considered. He was a “operating by his gut” sort of leader in many things. He was a big fan of guns, and a bigger fan of war.
Of course, to be fair, he was also highly intellectual and very curious about “how the world works”. So I guess there are some differences to consider.
