I’m a big fan of this genre, as well and have read most of those. Too many to list, really. Teddy Roosevelt lead quite an interesting life as a politician, big game hunter, etc. The most improbable thing he did was to attempt to explore an Amazonian river, the details of which are captured in the book River of Doubt. The trip nearly killed him, and he never really recovered after his return.
And who it was who handled it. I’d say that identifying an individual by the traces of their scent they leave on their environment qualifies as “bloodhound-like”. Maybe not as good as an actual bloodhound can do, but certainly similar.
He as my first thought. A life that included a Nobel peace prize, battlefield actions that later got him awarded the Medal of Honor, and finishing his campaign speech after being shot in an assassination attempt.
Chinese would-be civil servant has a nervous breakdown during studying and has visions that convince him he’s the younger brother of Jesus Christ and that he needs to lead a Christian revolt against the ruling dynasty. His movement grows into an army that eventually conquers Nanjing and results in a civil war that had more casualties than any conflict besides World War II.
It’s been years since I read that Feynman autobiography but I thought he was playing a game with his wife in her hospital room in New Mexico. He knew beforehand that his wife handled one of a number of old books on a bookshelf; he just didn’t know which book. Am I remembering it correctly? If so, he didn’t really identify her by scent; he just smelled something different about that book.
A Napoleonic era commander in the Royal Navy, freedom fighter for various South American countries, political radical, money grubbing charlatan, and one of the most audacious seamen ever to go into battle. He was close to using chemical weapons(stink ships) against the Russians during the Crimean War at the advanced age of late 70’s. I don’t know how humane it would have been to use chemical weapons this way but what an adventure it would have been to see the old sea-dog attempt it.
The River of Doubt Quote from Amazon -“At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, The River of Doubt is the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth.”
A great book. I turned my Wife onto it and she loves it (though not much for biographies and adventure novels"
Thanks Cartoonacy. So I remembered the book wrong but I think my point still stands. He did a good job identifying which books had been handled. Randomness would have him with a roughly 1% chance of finding all the books that had been handled and not misidentifying any books that hadn’t been handled.
The rules of the game are unclear. If he knew three different people handled three different books, there is no good way to get two out of three correctly. He should either have gotten all three, swapped two with each other (getting one right), or gotten none of them. So I think there was an experimental design problem. Perhaps after each guess, he was told whether he had the right person. So, he identified the first person correctly (randomly - 1/3 chance, but easier if, let’s say, one person were a heavy smoker or perfume wearer who was easy to identify). Then, he could have guessed the second wrongly (1/2 chance) and then repeated his second guess on the third book (100% chance of getting it correct by process of elimination). This doesn’t seem like any particular talent for identifying which person handled the book.
“The Last Battle” by Stephen Harding at the end of World war II American and German soldiers team up to save high-ranking French prisoners from being killed by the SS.