From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rain forest to the darkest night of Theodore Roosevelt’s life, here is Candice Millard’s dazzling debut.

At least Roosevelt earned his Nobel Peace Prize by having actually brought peace to a conflict and by having lived a life worthy of a man.

River of doubt : Theodore Roosevelt’s darkest journey      0385507968 Candice Millard Roosevelt, Theodore, 1858-1919 , Travel , Brazil , Roosevelt River New York : Doubleday, 2005 Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing.  ix, 416 p., [16] p. of plates : ill. ; 24 cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. [395]-402) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text. VG/VG Guaranteed to be shipped within 24 hours of our receipt of your order 24/7/365

The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron.

After his election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever.

Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of despair. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived.

The American Axis is not only a mesmerizing, cautionary tale, but a compelling historical expose.

The real problem is, that like most exposes, it is full of slanders of the dead and half truths.

FDR’s largess with taxpayer dollars had lightened the load of the Depression on enough people by 1936 that he was able to be reelected in a landslide. Unfortunately, as with all unsound economic policies, there was not enough to go around and by 1938 the United States was in arguably worse economic condition than it had been in 1932 and the free market parts of the economy continued sliding making the 1940 election a dubious proposition for the Democrats.

Since all FDR knew was government intervention and public works the whole country had to be employed in a war effort – while being promised there would be no fighting for our boys – and ANYONE who opposed this was obviously guilty of treason – or worse.

FDR was singularly fortunate in having Henry Ford as an opponent. The man was an unbridled SOB who had no regard for anything other than the Ford Motor Company and he would have happily lived under any dictatorship so long as it controlled his labor, costs and guaranteed unimpeded access to his markets. Hating Henry Ford in the American democracy before the war was like speaking ill of the devil to the College of Cardinals.

Charles Augustus Lindbergh was an entirely different matter. He was the American Eagle and many of his contacts with the Germans had been made at the request og high ranking American officers. He was the man who told them they were unprepared to fight the Luftwaffe.

Before the declaration of war and the commencement of hostilities against Americans being opposed to the war was not a crime. It was, in fact, a sound policy and left to their own devices the Europeans might have fought for twenty years or more having never posed a threat to the United States of America. How much better to have a war opposed by a patriot than by the likes of Michael Moore. When will we learn to listen to the patriots?

The American axis : Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the rise of the Third Reich    New York : St. Martin’s Press, 2003  Max Wallace United States , History , 20th century Hardcover. 1st ed. and printing. ix, 465 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.  Includes bibliographical references (p. 391-451) and index. Clean, tight and strong binding with clean dust jacket. No highlighting, underlining or marginalia in text.  VG/VG

Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh have long been exalted as two of the greatest American icons of the twentieth century. From award-winning journalist Max Wallace comes groundbreaking and astonishing revelations about the poisonous effect these two so-called American heroes had on Western democracy. In his wide ranging investigation, Wallace goes further than any other historian to expose how Ford and Lindbergh-acting in league with the Nazis-almost brought democratic Europe to the verge of extinction.

With unprecedented access to declassified FBI and military intelligence files, Wallace reveals how the close friendship and ideological bond between automotive pioneer Ford and aviator Lindbergh culminated in an abuse of power that helped strengthen Hitler’s regime and undermined the Allied war effort. Wallace traces Henry Ford’s ties to Nazi Germany back as far as the 1920s, presenting compelling evidence of a financial paper trail proving that Ford subsidized the rise to power of Adolph Hitler, who described Ford as “my inspiration.” For the first time, the genesis of Ford’s notorious Anti-Semitism is uncovered: The American Axis proves that Ford’s private secretary and life-long confidante was a German spy, who channeled his employer’s Jew-baiting crusades to further the cause of the Third Reich.

Lindbergh’s own anti-Semitism and white-Supremacist views captured the attention of the Nazis, who soon manipulated him in their clandestine Fifth Column efforts. As the first unauthorized biographer to gain access to the Lindbergh archives, Wallace paints a substantially more chilling portrait of Lindbergh’s pre-war activities than any previous historian and produces new evidence that the Nazis secretly plotted to install Lindbergh as the leader of the movement to keep America out of World War Two.

The most controversial corporate investigation since IBM and the Holocaust, the book reveals that the Ford Motor Company’s military and political complicity in the Third Reich war effort was considerably stronger than the company has acknowledged and that a US Army post-war investigation concluded that the company had become “an arsenal of Nazism.” Wallace disputes a recent internal investigation into the use of slave labor at Ford’s German plant during World War II – which company officials claimed as a vindication of its wartime activities – and reveals that corporate President Edsel Ford was about to be indicted by the US government for “Trading With the Enemy” at the time of his 1943 death.