Travel: Theodore Roosevelt was not good at playing second fiddle. He ran for the American presidency twice and won. Then, after four years of not being president, he couldn't stand it any longer and stood again.
This time, failing to win the Republican nomination, he stood for a third party - the Progressives. It was a fatal error. He lost, the Republicans lost, the socialist candidate polled twice as many votes as previously and Woodrow Wilson was elected - the first time a Democrat had got in in 16 years.
It was crunch time, when a man's got to do what a man's got to do, and Roosevelt did: in December 1913, aged 55, he set off on a five-month journey of exploration and adventure, the hardship destined to mask the pain of losing the election. His route lay through the rainforests of Brazil and along that part of the aptly named River of Doubt which, till then, had never been navigated. The team of 11 men took with them 16 Brazilian Indians, 110 mules, 70 oxen, seven dug-out canoes and enough delicacies in the way of mustard, wine and stuffed olives to host a presidential cocktail party. Nearly all of this had to be jettisoned when the going got tough, which it very quickly did.
There were problems right from the start. People attached themselves to the expedition certain it would bring them fame and fortune. One, a priest, had to be sent home at an early stage due to his appalling attitude to the indigenous people: "Indians are meant to carry priests," he said, explaining his desire to be transported in a divan chair. Roosevelt confined himself to a collapsible table and chair.
They spent close on three months fighting their way through the rainforest just to get to the river, their route marked by the graves of telegraph-pole workers. The oxen dug their heels in and refused to carry the heavy loads expected of them. The men got malaria and dysentery and their shoes rotted. Roosevelt had brought some of the new "fly dope", an ointment guaranteed to ward off mosquitoes. It didn't.
Once on the river, the danger level shot up. One man was drowned when their dug-outs were swept away. The indigenous forest dwellers, the Cinta Larga, kept watch from the silence of the forest, which the Americans found unnerving. Wisely, however, the Cinta Larga kept their distance: the expedition members were armed with guns.
Candice Millard is a former staff writer with National Geographic and writes marvellously about the ecology of the rainforest and has also drawn on the works of anthropologists such as Levi Strauss to examine the customs and attitudes of the Cinta Larga.
As with many expeditions at that time, there is a parallel story, which she dips in and out of - that of the exploitation of the Amazon by prospectors looking for rubber, not least for the tyres for Ford's Model-T cars. Then a nasty Englishman transplanted the seeds of a rubber tree to Kew, found it would grow even better in Malaysia and thus broke England's dependency on Brazil.
But by then, the damage had been done. "It is melancholy to note how they (the Cinta Larga) will change when civilisation comes here," wrote Kermit, Roosevelt's favourite son who accompanied his father on the expedition. One hundred years on, Brazil's indigeneous peoples, still suffer the effects of the exploitation by outsiders of their beloved rainforests.
Mallard is loyal to her subject, touching lightly on his pig-headedness and the manipulative nature of his relationship with Kermit. By the end of the expedition, weak and suffering from a leg wound, he melodramatically tells his son to leave him there to die. Naturally, his long-suffering young son does nothing of the sort - but being the son of Theodore Roosevelt may have contributed to Kermit's end. A 52-year-old alcoholic, he was sent to Alaska by the then president of the United States, his own cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ostensibly to watch out for stray Japanese. There, he put a gun to his head and shot himself.
The River of Doubt: Into the Unknown Amazon By Candice Millard Little, Brown, 430pp. £18.99
Mary Russell is a travel writer