Bison, bear, cougar, elk, moose, deer. That roll call is most of what the listing tells you about this audiobook, and it turns out to be an accurate table of contents. Theodore Roosevelt published these recollections eight years before the presidency, and the recording runs nine hours and forty-six minutes, undertaken according to the description on the hundredth anniversary of his death. A commemorative production, in other words, rather than an incidental one.
Preserving What He Hunts and Hunting What He Preserves
What survives here is one of the more peculiar documents in American letters: a sitting president's future self, writing before any of that, cataloging game he pursued across the country in the register of a man who genuinely loved the country he was shooting in. A five-star response from July 2024 describes it as 'a firsthand account of his adventures in the rugged landscapes of the West,' and firsthand is the operative word. Nothing here is researched. It is all remembered.
That same reader lists Roosevelt's three identities in one breath, as conservationist, hunter, and former President of the United States, and that first pair sitting together without friction is the interpretive puzzle of the entire book. Roosevelt does not experience those roles as contradictory. He is preserving what he hunts and hunting what he preserves, and the modern listener supplies a tension the text simply does not carry. How you handle that gap will determine whether nine and a half hours feels like history or like an argument.
The listing gives you almost nothing to work with beyond that. Two sentences of description for a book of this length, no chapter guidance, no note on what proportion covers which animal or which region. You are buying on the author's name and on a runtime, which is unusual for a title with 166 ratings behind it, and it means the review pool has to do more explaining than review pools normally do.
Easy to Hear a Voice and Vernacular
Unknowingly, a reader of the printed edition made the best available argument for this recording. A five-star response from September 2015 observes that 'Roosevelt writes as he spoke,' and that his voice and vernacular are easy to hear on the page. That is a compliment about prose rhythm from someone with no recording available to them, and it is precisely the quality that makes a text worth transferring to audio in the first place. The sentences were built for the ear before anyone thought to read them aloud.
Specific pleasures named in that review are the right ones: buffalo hunts, livestock drives, and encampments living off the land across the western plains and the Black Mountains. Roosevelt is unusually good at logistics, at the texture of a camp, at weather and terrain and the boredom between events. Nature writing of the period often floats above the practicalities. This one is full of them, which is why the landscape registers as a place you could stand in.
The production's occasion is worth weighing as well. Spoken Realms brought this out in June 2019, a century after Roosevelt's death, which frames the whole thing as a deliberate commemorative project rather than one of the many casual public-domain conversions that surround a famous name. That does not guarantee anything about the reading, but it does tell you somebody chose this book on purpose, for a reason, at a specific moment.
A Review Praising a Reprint's Lack of Smudges
A chronology problem runs through the review pool, and it is a large one. Two of the five written responses were posted before this recording existed. One predates the June 2019 release by nearly four years. The other landed on June 16, 2019, twelve days early, and is unambiguously about paper: it praises the quality of a reprint of the 1910 edition from Leupold Classic Library, reporting that 'the pages are all nice and clear with no smudges or other issues.'
So the 4.5 average across 166 ratings is pooling verdicts on Roosevelt's text, on at least one physical reprint, and on this audio production, with no way to separate them. That matters before you take the score as an endorsement of the listening experience specifically. The text is a known quantity with a century of readers behind it. The recording is the part you will be judging yourself.
Now the content itself, which needs stating plainly. This is a hunting book, written by an enthusiast, and it does not look away from the killing or the butchering. Descriptions of the harvesting of game are detailed and frequent, offered without apology because none was expected of it. The listing files it under Politics and Activism, which is misleading in both directions: it promises a political memoir the book is not, and it implies a conservation argument that the hunting narrative complicates rather than supports.
A Hunter Telling Campfire Hunting Stories
The most useful audience note on the page comes from a four-star response in July 2024, headed with the warning that this is a selective audience read. That reader's summary is exact and worth quoting whole: 'it's a hunter telling campfire hunting stories and all that goes with them.' If that sentence sounds like an evening well spent, this is your book. If it sounds like an endurance test, believe it, because nine and a half hours is a long campfire.
Conservation history is the other constituency, since this rewards anyone wanting the primary source rather than the summary, alongside readers of landscape writing willing to take a period sensibility on its own terms. It also functions as a gift for a certain kind of reader, and the length and subject make it well suited to slow listening across a season rather than a week.
Roosevelt the president is not here. Nothing here anticipates the office, and the man on these pages is a private citizen with a rifle and a great deal of time. Avoid it too if detailed accounts of animals being shot and dressed will spoil the landscape writing for you, because the two are not separable. What is left, for the right listener, is one of the great American accounts of being outdoors before the outdoors got small.
Key Details
- Voice: Jack Chekijian is the credited reader on a 2019 production timed deliberately to the hundredth anniversary of Roosevelt's death.
- Big ideas: Frontier hunting, American landscape writing, conservation and its contradictions, a president before the presidency
- Atmosphere: Unhurried, granular, thoroughly of its century
- Worth it?: Superb period nature writing if you can sit with what its author was actually doing out there.
Does this audiobook cover Roosevelt's presidency at all?
No. He wrote it eight years before reaching the office, and the material is entirely hunting and wilderness recollection: bison, bear, cougar, elk, moose and deer, across various parts of the country. Anyone wanting the political life should look for a biography or his later writings instead.
How graphic is the hunting content in this audiobook?
Detailed and unsparing. Roosevelt describes pursuit, killing and the harvesting of game animals at length, as a sportsman of his day writing for other sportsmen. Nothing is sensationalized, but nothing is softened either, and the descriptions are frequent enough that they cannot be skipped past.
Why was this recording made in 2019?
The description states it was undertaken on the hundredth anniversary of Roosevelt's death, which places the production as an intentional centenary project. That also explains why a long out-of-copyright title received a fresh commercial recording from a named audio publisher rather than a casual conversion.
