The beast in the clouds The Roosevelt brothers' deadly quest to find the mythical giant panda

Review by Booklist Review

In 1929, Ted and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of former President Theodore Roosevelt, led an expedition to China in search of the elusive giant panda bear. Sponsored by the Chicago Field Museum, the mission's goal was to bring back a complete specimen for taxidermy and display. As Holt (Wise Gals, 2022) deftly recounts, for both the brothers and those who accompanied them, the trip ended up changing their lives. Their accomplishments were great, but the fallout from the expedition would be nearly catastrophic for the panda, as it quickly became a target for big game hunters around the world. Hunters' use of the Roosevelts' published maps to find the animal was especially devastating for Kermit, who became an ardent conservationist in the years that followed, during which he also struggled with addiction. Holt draws on the Roosevelts' book, Trailing the Giant Panda (1929), reports from other expedition members, interviews, and media coverage to tell a grand tale of adventure and high drama. Both stirring and tragic, this is an excellently told story about an overlooked segment of history. Highly recommended for book clubs.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A story of a star-crossed scientific expedition by two sons of Theodore Roosevelt. Holt, a journalist who has written several books about overlooked women in history, here turns her attention to an odd gap in the world of natural history--namely, the lack of any formal record of the giant panda, "whose whereabouts, habitat, and behavior were still unknown" other than by anecdote outside China. Indeed, when Kermit and Ted Roosevelt traveled to China in quest of the panda in the late 1920s, it was widely assumed that it was a kind of polar bear, so that "researchers expected the animal to be extraordinarily fierce…and likely one of the most aggressive animals in the world." As the brothers, working under the aegis of the American Museum of Natural History, venture into country that no non-Chinese visitor has ever seen, they face howling winter storms in 16,000-foot-tall mountains, endure starvation, and lose half of their pack mules and supplies. Such might be the dangers of travel in the wilderness under the best of circumstances, but, Holt clearly establishes, the brothers both lacked the intrepidity of their famed father and sometimes took unnecessary risks. The story becomes grim when members of the expedition kill a rare golden monkey, leaving its baby an orphan that does not live out the night: "They skinned the tiny creature for the museum," Holt writes, "but its death hung heavily round their heads." After they finally catch up with a giant panda, their bad luck becomes worse still: The expedition ends in serious illness; both brothers survive but become estranged from one another, with Kermit descending into alcoholism, and both nursing the knowledge that the blustery adventures they report to the public on their homecoming are only part of the story. Holt's narrative brims with missteps and tragedy, but it's a worthy addition to the history of scientific exploration. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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