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Rohter chronicles the Brazilian officer who strung telegraph lines across the Amazon while mapping vast unknown territory. The biography centers his rare fusion of scientific exploration with a mission to protect the people he encountered.
Rondon's guiding doctrine toward Indigenous peoples forbade violence even in self-defense during first contact. This ethic anchored Brazil's early Indian Protection Service and reframed exploration as service rather than conquest.
The book recounts the near-fatal 1913-14 descent of the uncharted River of Doubt that Rondon led with a broken ex-president Theodore Roosevelt. The ordeal cements Rondon's reputation and dramatizes the Amazon's lethal indifference.
Rohter reads Rondon's legacy as an early insistence that protecting the rainforest and protecting its native inhabitants are one cause. The portrait links twentieth-century exploration to present-day Amazon politics.