The River of Doubt

"After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil's most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it."

Teddy Roosevelt is a controversial figure, but Millard - a former National Geographic writer and editor - does a wonderful job of telling us the story of an extraordinary journey while never avoiding his faults or acknowledging the contributions of everyone around him.

While the book starts out telling Roosevelt's personal story for wanting to make the trip, it spends as much time telling the story of the river as it does the men who championed it.

If you like adventure stories that focus on the natural surroundings being overcome, you'll love this

I felt like a geezer as I read and liked [a:Candice Millard|44565|Candice Millard|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1354557271p2/44565.jpg]'s book about Theodore Roosevelt's discovery of a river in Brazil. Like one of those armchair travelers who reads about solo sailboat crossings of the Pacific Ocean, or a Civil War buff. It's a great book though and, more than the other of her three that I read, [b:Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill|25241653|Hero of the Empire The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill|Candice Millard|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1471286323l/25241653.SY75.jpg|44961146], Miller's ability to write about nature makes [b:The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey|78508|The River of Doubt Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey|Candice Millard|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1430014768l/78508.SY75.jpg|980007] fascinating. You can almost feel the hardships the explorers endured while searching for it.
You also learn about much more than the exploration. I was rusty on Roosevelt's presidency and his relationship to FDR. This refreshed my memory of much of it. More important is how much you'll learn about Brazil and the fascinating history of it's progressive movement, which is easy to forget at the time I read this book, when it's president, Bolsonaro, is known as South America's Donald Trump. The real hero of the book is a man named Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, whose a great national hero in Brazil and worth reading about in books solely about him.
I'm always a little disappointed when a writer as good at Millard uses as many adverbs as she does and writes things like "twelve noon," but she did nothing so bad that I wouldn't recommend this book to others.

Unlike the woods of New England, where Roosevelt had spent years exploring and learning about nature, the rain forest floor was not covered with thick leaf litter or plant life, but appeared largely empty, characterized only by a shallow layer of soil shot through with thin white threadlike fibers. Just as unusual, each tree in the Amazon rain forest appeared to be nearly unique. Many trees had commonly shaped leaves, but stands or groupings of a single tree species were very rare, and after identifying one tree the men could search for hours before finding another of the same kind. The trees themselves were often strange and complex, characterized by huge buttresses, flowering trunks, or apparent branches that plunged back into the earth or were wrapped in enormous looped or curled vines. Most important, other than insects, which teemed everywhere, the forest seemed virtually empty, with little or no sign or sound of any inhabitants.

A fine telling of the incredible story of Teddy Roosevelt's exploration of the course of a mostly unknown 1000 mile-long tributary of the Amazon river in 1913 - 1914 when he was age 55. In addition to the usual accouterments, piranha, the candiru fish, and hostile cannibalistic Indians, at least three characters, the former President, Colonel Cândido Rondon, and the president's second son, Kermit, are interesting principal actors. The story is complemented by appropriate review of the natural history of the forest and the geology of the river basin.

Note that accounts of the effects of the candiru fish may be exaggerated:
https://www.decodedscience.org/candiru-a-dont-pee-in-the-water-horror-story-debunked/31635

My e-book edition has two maps in it that you might be able to read with a magnifying glass, but no photographs. But there is a nice public domain image here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:River-doubt-team.jpg
that says that it is scanned from an edition of this book.

President Roosevelt's own account, Through the Brazilian Wilderness is available and well-reviewed on Goodreads.