Roosevelt's popular book Through the Brazilian Wilderness describes his expedition into the Brazilian jungle in 1913 as a member of the Roosevelt-Rondon Scientific Expedition co-named after its leader, Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon. The book describes all of the scientific discovery, scenic tropical vistas and exotic flora, fauna and wild life experienced on the expedition. One goal of the expedition was to find the headwaters of the Rio da Duvida, the River of Doubt, and trace it north to the Madeira and thence to the Amazon River. It was later renamed Rio Roosevel. Roosevelt's crew consisted of his 24-year-old son Kermit, Colonel Cândido Rondon, a naturalist sent by the American Museum of Natural History named George K. Cherrie, Brazilian Lieutenant Joao Lyra, team physician Dr. José Antonio Cajazeira, and sixteen highly skilled paddlers (called camaradas in Portuguese). The initial expedition started on December 9, 1913, at the height of the rainy season. The trip down the River of Doubt started on February 27, 1914. During the trip down the river, Roosevelt contracted malaria and a serious infection resulting from a minor le...

Adventure, History, Memoirs, Nature, Science

The Two Paths is a collection of five lectures delivered in 1858 and 1859 by John Ruskin on art and architecture. This is how the author himself presents the book: The following addresses, though spoken at different times, are intentionally connected in subject; their aim being to set one or two main principles of art in simple light before the general student, and to indicate their practical bearing on modern design. The law which it has been my effort chiefly to illustrate is the dependence of all noble design, in any kind, on the sculpture or painting of Organic Form. The most famous of these, the fifth lecture, is commonly known simply as The Work of Iron (Summary by Leni)...

Art

The year is 1838. The scene is the dense Honduran forest along the Copán River. Two men, John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood, are about to rediscover Mayan civilization. Their guide, slashing through the rampant growth with his machete, leads them to a structure with steps up the side, shaped like a pyramid. Next they see a stone column, fourteen feet high, sculptured on the front with a portrait of a man, “solemn, stern and well fitted to excite terror,” covered on the sides with hieroglyphics, and with workmanship “equal to the finest monuments of the Egyptians.” Stephens records these discoveries and also his travels in Central America, where he had been sent by President Van Buren as special ambassador to the ill-fated Republic of Central America. The republic being engulfed in civil war when Stephens arrives in Guatemala, he finds himself dodging revolutionary armies while he hunts for a “legitimate government” to which to present his credentials. Catherwood, meanwhile, directs his immense artistic talent to illustrating views of Mayan architecture. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan was a best...

Adventure, Travel, Art, History

Capital, Volume I is the first of three volumes in Karl Marx’s monumental work, Das Kapital, and the only volume to be published during his lifetime, in 1867. Marx’s aim in Capital, Volume I is to uncover and explain the laws specific to the capitalist mode of production and of the class struggles rooted in these capitalist social relations of production. Marx said himself that his aim was “to bring a science [i.e. political economy] by criticism to the point where it can be dialectically represented”, and in this way to “reveal the law of motion of modern society”. By showing how capitalist development was the precursor of a new, socialist mode of production, he aimed to provide a scientific foundation for the modern labour movement. In preparation for his book, he studied the economic literature available in his time for a period of twelve years, mainly in the British Museum in London.(Summary by Wikipedia)...

Philosophy, Politics, Economics/Political Economy

How to live on 5 cents a day! How to survive financial ruin without losing your house! How to keep to a bare bones budget and still have money left over to buy books! Tough questions! They were tough questions even in the 1870’s, when Sarah Elizabeth Harper Monmouth penned her quirky memoir, the subtitle of which was “How a Lady, Having Lost a Sufficient Income from Government Bonds by Misplaced Confidence, Reduced to a Little Homestead Whose Entire Income is But $40.00 per Annum, Resolved to Hold It, Incurring no Debts and Live Within it. How She has Lived for Three Years and Still Lives on Half a Dime a Day.” Sarah Elizabeth (‘Lizzie‘) Monmouth, born in 1829, was a Civil War widow, living on a run-down small farm in New Hampshire, when her investments imploded. She awoke one morning to find herself poor--an old roof above her, “dearer than life,” but “not a dollar of money left.” For months she was “paralyzed with cold, clammy terror . . . stunned and knew not what to do.” Then her “mind stepped to the front with a bold standard displayed.” She said to herself “Understand, once for all, that I rule and make your plans accordingly....

Advice, Memoirs