THE BEAST IN THE CLOUDS: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda, by Nathalia Holt
In 1869, a French missionary dispatched from Chengdu to Paris the pelt of an animal that had never been seen in Europe: a bear with black and white fur, which scientists would call a panda, apparently derived from the Nepalese term meaning “bamboo eater.”
Over the next six decades, expeditions to find the elusive mammal failed to bring one back — either dead or alive. That set the stage for President Theodore Roosevelt’s two eldest sons, Kermit and Ted, who in 1929 obtained the backing of Chicago’s Field Museum and set off for Asia in search of immortality.
“The Beast in the Clouds” is Nathalia Holt’s immersive, sometimes harrowing account of the siblings’ Himalayan adventure. In her prior books, Holt has excelled at telling tales of high-achieving women in male-dominated institutions. Her focus this time is on an equally engrossing dynamic, that of emotionally damaged sons drawn into an all-consuming competition with their alpha-male father.
As Holt tells it, the brothers’ ambitions were fueled by a deep sense of inadequacy. Kermit and Ted had a loving but difficult relationship with their larger-than-life father. Theodore Roosevelt played boisterous games with his children and wrote them long, affectionate letters from his travels. But he had no tolerance for fecklessness and failure, once ridiculing Kermit as “a weakling.” His shadow “influenced their every action and demeanor toward others,” Holt writes.
As the assistant secretary of the Navy during the Harding administration, Ted became implicated in the Teapot Dome bribery scandal, detonating his political aspirations. Kermit failed at business, drank heavily and was serially unfaithful to his wife.
The search for the giant panda, Holt suggests, was the brothers’ shot at redemption. With a team of porters and guides, the Roosevelts climbed out of the tropical river valleys along the Burma-China border toward the high mountain passes of Tibet. They endured blizzards, ambushes by bandits, food shortages and debilitating bouts of altitude sickness.
The experts who joined the team were sometimes more of a hindrance than a help. Tai Jack Young, the Hawaii-born son of a Chinese American father and a Chinese mother, signed on as the team’s interpreter, but his Mandarin proved to be useless in Himalayan villages. The team’s zoologist and botanist, Herbert Stevens, dawdled on the trail for hours searching for exotic flora and fauna.
Sublime moments — a friendly encounter with Tibetan monks in a richly decorated lamasery, a sighting of rare golden monkeys in a high-altitude forest — could abruptly give way to scenes of horror. Passing through a town, Jack Young watched with shock and disbelief as officials of the Kuomintang, the Chinese party in power, executed three teenage boys who had spoken out against shakedowns by the Nationalist Army.
Yet the Roosevelts often found in this remote corner of the earth a kind of blissful anonymity. “It was a strange, weightless feeling to realize that all their family’s wealth, importance and influence had dissipated into nothing,” Holt writes, “vanquished by geography.”
Holt’s narrative invites comparisons to Candice Millard’s “The River of Doubt,” a gripping account of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1913 scientific mission with the Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon on a rapids-filled tributary of the Amazon. Yet “The Beast in the Clouds” doesn’t quite match the power of Millard’s book. The tribulations endured by the Roosevelt brothers, while dramatic, pale in comparison with the horrors suffered by their father on the river. (The only casualty on the brothers’ “deadly quest” was a young American scientist, who makes a brief appearance three-quarters of the way through, then dies of cerebral malaria.)
Holt leans heavily on the Roosevelts’ 1929 memoir, “Trailing the Giant Panda,” which can sometimes give her book a derivative feeling. Seeking to infuse her own voice in the story, she breaks from quoting Ted and Kermit to ruminate on foot-binding, Mekong River dolphins, the symbiotic relationship between pandas and bamboo forests, and the toughness of female Himalayan porters. Many of these digressions add color and context, but some — like an extended riff on polar bears — seem like padding.
The Roosevelt saga didn’t end happily. After a long Himalayan slog, the brothers tracked down and shot a panda in a bamboo forest — but the bloody denouement had unintended consequences. Guilt-ridden and distraught about having killed an animal that, contrary to legend, turned out to be a gentle giant, they took no pleasure in the adulation that greeted them upon their return.
Kermit threw himself into conservation work for the New York Zoological Society. But he sank deeper into alcoholism, became a drug addict and died by suicide in 1943.
Still obsessed with proving his mettle, an ailing 56-year-old Ted hobbled onto a Normandy beach on D-Day, then died of a heart attack 36 days later.
“Ted and Kermit’s lives had shattered into pieces around them,” Holt writes toward the end of this absorbing book. Despite all they had achieved in one of the most hostile corners of the world, they could never escape from their father’s looming shadow.
THE BEAST IN THE CLOUDS: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda | By Nathalia Holt | Atria/OneSignal | 265 pp. | $29.99
The post Seeking the Giant Panda, and Daddy’s Love appeared first on New York Times.
