Today we think of Theodore Roosevelt as a larger-than-life figure, but before he became a legendary outdoorsman, Badlands rancher, Rough Rider, trust buster, and political maverick, he was a thin pale youngster with bad eyes and a weak heart, in the words of William Wingate Sewall, the upcountry Maine woodsman who would become Roosevelt's mentor and lifelong friend. The two met at a crucial time in Roosevelt's life, and Sewall exerted a quiet but profound influence on the man who would become America's twenty-sixth president. Book jacket.

Andrew Vietze, the former managing editor of Down East: The Magazine of Maine, has written for a wide variety of magazines and online publications, including Time Out New York, The New York Times’ LifeWire, Weather.com’s Forecast Earth,Crawdaddy!, AMC Outdoors, Popmatters, Hooked on the Outdoors, Explore, Offshore, Big Sky Journal, MaineBiz, and Maine Times. Two of his pieces for Down East have won awards for feature writing from the International Regional Magazine Association.
Becoming Teddy Roosevelt: How a Maine Guide Inspired America’s 26th President won a silver medal at the Independent Publisher Book Awards, was honored by the Maine State Legislature, and was a 2010 Book of the Year Award finalist in the biography category. It also spent weeks on the Maine Sunday Telegram‘s bestseller list and inspired the Lunder New Naturalists program at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, which uses the story of Theodore Roosevelt as an entry point for middle schoolers into the world of conservation. More than 19 schools and 600 students, are now part of the statewide program.
Vieteze spends six months of each year as a ranger in the wilds of the Katahdin region.