Into the Amazon

November 1, 2022

In Magnificent Rebel, prolific biographer de Courcy (Chanel's Riviera) focuses on the 13 years celebrated English socialite, poet, and publisher Nancy Cunard spent in Paris and the five men (among many) with whom she had affairs: writers Ezra Pound, Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen, and Louis Aragon and jazz pianist Henry Crowder (50,000-copy first printing). Archaeologist and University of Glasgow lecturer Draycott reconstructs the life of Cleopatra's Daughter, born to Roman Triumvir Marc Antony and Egyptian Queen Cleopatra VII and eventually queen of Mauretania, an ancient African kingdom. A former Rio de Janeiro bureau chief for the New York Times, Rohter revisits the life of Indigenous Brazilian explorer, scientist, statesman, and conservationist C�ndido Rondon, who guided Theodore Roosevelt Into the Amazon, lay a 1,200-mile telegraph line through the region's heart, and was thrice nominated for a Nobel Prize. A director of five presidential libraries and a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, Smith reassesses President Gerald Ford in An Ordinary Man, praising his basic decency and considered decision making as qualities needed in U.S. politics today (40,000-copy first printing). Wallace tells readers plenty they probably don't know about Helen Keller in After the Miracle: among other things, she blasted Jim Crow laws, Hitler's rise to power, and Joseph McCarthy; sided with the antifascists during the Spanish Civil War; and raised money to defend Nelson Mandela (50,000-copy first printing). In The Wounded World, Brandeis professor Williams (Torchbearers of Democracy) recounts W.E.B. Du Bois's two-decade effort to write an account of Black soldiers during World War I; he was bitterly disappointed that supporting the war (which he had urged) did not win Black Americans full rights (50,000-copy first printing).

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Starred review from February 27, 2023
This stirring biography by Rohter (Brazil on the Rise), the former Rio de Janeiro bureau chief for the New York Times, chronicles the achievements of Brazilian Renaissance man Cândido Rondon (1865–1958), an accomplished explorer and the namesake of the Brazilian state of Rondônia. Rohter’s cradle to grave treatment masterfully weaves the disparate strands of Rondon’s eclectic life, beginning with his childhood as an impoverished orphan. Rondon enlisted in the army at 16 and later became an army engineer, receiving national plaudits for overseeing the construction of telegraph lines through the Amazon to connect disparate regions of Brazil. Emphasizing the significance of this accomplishment, Rohter compares it to America’s transcontinental railroad and suggests it helped Brazil transition from “a haphazardly organized empire to a modern republic.” The author also describes how Rondon, himself of Indigenous descent, founded Brazil’s Indian Protection Service in 1910 (for which Albert Einstein nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize) and posits that Rondon’s expeditions through 25,000 miles of wilderness (including leading Theodore Roosevelt’s “River of Doubt” trip) make him the “greatest explorer of the tropics in recorded history.” Rohter’s thorough research and eye for detail make for a vivid telling of a remarkable tale. This is a trip well worth taking.

Starred review from March 1, 2023
Comprehensive biography of a Brazilian hero whose history is largely, unjustly unknown. C�ndido Mariano da Silva Rondon (1865-1958), writes former New York Times Rio de Janeiro bureau chief Rohter, was definitively a man of parts. Of mixed Indigenous, Portuguese, and Spanish descent, he guided an exhausted Theodore Roosevelt on his 1914 Amazon expedition and then returned immediately to a long project of stringing telegraph lines across the Brazilian jungle, "much of it across terrain inhabited only by hostile or uncontacted Indian tribes." Rondon--for whom the vast Brazilian state of Rond�nia is named--counseled that these tribes should be treated with dignity and left alone, and he forbade members of his exploratory expeditions from firing on them. Over decades as an army officer, scholar, and activist, he was successful not just in building telegraph lines, the first step in linking remote sections of a far-flung nation, but also in establishing preserves for Indigenous peoples after "finding a way into a place that no one, not even Native peoples living nearby, had ever braved." A larger-than-life character overshadowing even Roosevelt, Rondon was silenced by a succession of dictators against whom his commitment to logical positivism and moral solutions to political problems didn't stand much of a chance. Sidelined and stripped of his rank as general, he had to watch as the environmental protection agencies he helped create were dismantled and his beloved Amazon invaded by miners, loggers, and settlers, with disastrous consequences for the Native peoples of the region. However, he was such an effective diplomat and Indigenous rights advocate that Albert Einstein nominated Rondon for a Nobel Peace Prize, calling him "a philanthropist and leader of the first order." As Rohter notes in this lively biography, long after his death, Rondon "remains a combatant through the relevance of his ideas." A welcome, vivid portrait of a historical figure who deserves much wider recognition outside his native country.

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