We took breakfast-the eleven o'clock Brazilian breakfast-on Colonel Rondon's boat. Caymans were becoming more plentiful. The ugly brutes lay on the sand-flats and mud banks like logs, always with the head raised, sometimes with the jaws open. They are often dangerous to domestic animals, and are always destructive to fish, and it is good to shoot them. I killed half a dozen, and missed nearly as many more-a throbbing boat does not improve one's aim.
-from Through the Brazilian Wilderness
As much a symbol of the nation's adventurous past as he was the very picture of booming 20th-century progress, Theodore Roosevelt-politician and soldier, naturalist and historian-was still a young man when he left the Oval Office, and he spent the decade after his presidency exploring the world... and sharing his experiences in his inimitable prose.
This two-in-one volume includes "an account of a zoogeographic reconnoissance through the Brazilian hinterland" Roosevelt undertook in 1913 for the benefit of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and a collection of essays on natural history from throughout Roosevelt's life, including "Birds of the Adirondack," written when he was only 18, and "The Wild Ostrich," completed just months before his death.
Roosevelt's real-life exploits and observations of the natural world remain entertaining and insightful today, and continue to illuminate the life and character of one of the great American personalities.
Also available from Cosimo Classics: Roosevelt's Letters to His Children, A Book-Lover's Holidays in the Open, America and the World War, Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses, and Historic Towns: New York
OF INTEREST TO: Roosevelt fans, readers of autobiography, amateur naturalists, armchair travelers
American icon THEODORE ROOSEVELT (1858-1919) was 26th President of the United States, serving from 1901 to 1909, and the first American to win a Nobel Prize, in 1906, when he was awarded the Peace Prize for mediating the Russo-Japanese War. He is the author of 35 books.
