The River of Doubt

After his humbling defeat in the 1912 election, Theodore Roosevelt set out on the hardest physical challenge he could think of, a first run down an unmapped Amazon tributary in Brazil, choked with rapids and later renamed the Roosevelt River. Candice Millard's first book follows that expedition, on which he travelled with his son Kermit and Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Brazil's best known explorer. The men lost canoes and supplies to whitewater and faced starvation, disease, drowning, Indian attack and a murder within their own party. Three died, and Roosevelt came close to suicide. Many at the time doubted the feat. The book won the William Rockhill Nelson Award.

Ryan Holiday named it among his best book recommendations of 2013, calling it a shockingly good and unusual history of a U.S. president and saying he will read whatever else Millard writes.