The Beast in the Clouds
The Roosevelt Brothers' Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A New York Public Library Best Nonfiction Book of 2025 · A New York Times Book Review Critics’ Pick · A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2025 · Shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature
“A thrilling work of history that’s wilder than fiction.” —The Washington Post
“[An] immersive, sometimes harrowing account of the siblings’ Himalayan adventure.” —The New York Times
The stunning true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s sons and their 1929 Himalayan expedition to prove the existence of the panda bear to the western world, from the New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls.
The Himalayas—a snowcapped mountain range that hides treacherous glacier crossings, raiders poised to attack unsuspecting travelers, and air so thin that even seasoned explorers die of oxygen deprivation. Yet among the dangers lies one of the most beautiful and fragile ecosystems in the world.
By 1928, dozens of expeditions had scoured the Himalayas in search of the panda bear, an animal many believed to be a myth. That year the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt and a small team of scientists and naturalists launched their own dangerous journey. Lost in blizzards, attacked by robbers, ravaged by illness, and cut off from food supplies, the brothers’ crew was pushed to its physical and emotional limits. They would accomplish what years of exploration had not—introducing the panda to the Western world. Along the way, they documented a rapidly disappearing landscape and helped bring about a new era of conservation biology.
In The Beast in the Clouds, Nathalia Holt brings these events to life in a gripping nonfiction thriller about ambition, survival, and the indomitable Roosevelt spirit.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This gripping history is part survival epic, part family psychodrama, and part meditation on the cost of scientific ambition. In the late 1920s, Kermit and Theodore “Ted” Roosevelt Jr., sons of the former president, set off on a perilous expedition into the remote highlands of western China to track down a creature that at the time many Western scientists doubted existed: the giant panda. Historian Nathalia Holt recounts their journey with impressive depth and an eye for nuance, examining the brothers’ complex personalities as well as the problematic colonial mindset behind the expedition. The narrative takes some vivid and occasionally disturbing detours into topics like the brutal treatment of animals in the name of conservation, cultural arrogance, and the heavy personal toll this journey exacted on everyone involved. The Beast in the Clouds forces you to consider who gets to tell the story of discovery—and at what cost.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
