The Beast in the Clouds

“The best kind of summer reading escape: an adventure story with fascinating characters, plenty of thrills, and some serious ideas to chew on.”
—Boston Globe
“Readers will relish this graceful combination of enlightening research and propulsive action.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“A worthy addition to the history of scientific exploration.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)
“A grand tale of adventure and high drama.”
—Booklist
“Holt knows how to tell a mesmerizing story, and with The Beast in the Clouds she has combined her careful research and extraordinarily graceful writing with a little-known, endlessly fascinating story. The result is a beautiful and powerful book.”
—Candice Millard, author of The River of Doubt
“Valuable, revelatory, and contagiously page-turning: Holt has reconstructed a 1929 Himalayan expedition in new, immersive detail to show how proving the existence of the giant panda changed the lives of the two eldest sons of the original Teddy Bear, President Theodore Roosevelt, and forever altered the course of wildlife conservation.”
—David Michaelis, author of Eleanor
“An astonishing true story of adversity and ecological adventure. Holt puts readers inside the boots and minds of the Roosevelt brothers and their small cadre of explorers as they navigate their inner terrain of ambition, regret, and redemption.”
—Carol Shaben, author of Into the Abyss
“The Beast in the Clouds is more than just a great historical narrative. It’s a compelling story about the folly of man and the beauty of nature in a time of mystery.”
—Keith O’Brien, author of Fly Girls and Charlie Hustle
“Far more than just an exquisitely rendered account of a quest to track the giant panda in the bamboo forests of the Tibetan Plateau. Nathalia Holt also takes us on a darker journey of hubris and a misguided sense of destiny by Teddy Roosevelt’s sons that brought struggles, blunders and, in the end, moral reckonings. The storytelling is powerful and timeless.”
—Brian Murphy, author of 81 Days Below Zero
“Readers will vanish, along with the Roosevelt brothers, into a world of hidden dangers and astonishing delights. The panda lurks in every corner of Nathalia Holt’s The Beast in the Clouds, an exquisitely crafted book packed with adventure, mystery, and thorny dilemmas about what it means to hold all life sacred.”
—Melissa L. Sevigny, author of Brave the Wild River

Nathalia Holt, PhD, is the New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls, Wise Gals, The Queens of Animation, and Cured. She has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Slate, Popular Science, PBS, and Time. She is a former fellow at the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard University. She lives with her husband and their two daughters in Pacific Grove, California.

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