The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda

Bestseller Holt (Rise of the Rocket Girls) offers a scintillating account of a 1928 expedition to the Himalayan plateau undertaken by Ted and Kermit Roosevelt, the two eldest sons of Theodore Roosevelt. Their goal was to find and shoot a panda, a creature so rarely sighted that many thought it to be a myth. The brothers, Holt writes, hoped to achieve the status of world-famous explorers and thus escape the shadow of their big-game-hunting father, whose taxidermied kills filled America’s natural history museums. Among their party was Herbert Stevens, a British biologist “incapable of being in a hurry”; Suydam Cutting, a friend of Ted’s with comically little experience to recommend him for the journey; and 19-year-old Tai Jack Young, an NYU student of Chinese heritage who came on board as an interpreter but was overwhelmed by the plethora of local dialects. The team was unprepared as well for the dangerous weather conditions, and their survival ended up depending upon local guides, often women, with “superior knowledge of the mountains, superlative endurance,” and the skill to fend off bandits. After five months of trekking, the group found and killed their gentle, slow-moving prey, but, as Holt shows through her vivid, layered narrative, the experience filled them with a mounting horror and dramatically changed their attitudes toward ecological conservation. Readers will relish this graceful combination of enlightening research and propulsive action. (July)