Brain Brawn and Will

In 1878 at age 29 Jeff Ross ran away from his law practice and home in small-town Savannah Tennessee. He knocked about on fishing boats in the northeastern U.S. for a time ran a side-show in a circus hawked a ''magic solder'' for mending pots and pans. In 1880 he went to Europe where he bicycled hitchhiked and walked selling his ''magic solder'' and learning the languages. In 1881 he sailed ''before the mast'' from Marseilles to Rio de Janeiro where he immediately went on an exploring expedition into the wilds of Brazil. He then worked a dozen years with the infant railroad industry in Brazil Argentina and Uruguay. Though trained as a lawyer he became an on-the-job Civil Engineer and actually designed and built railroads and bridges. But his gift was as a construction foreman: he could ram-rod workers in French Italian Portuguese Spanish German and even English and he repeatedly finished jobs ahead of schedule and under budget. In 1893 he got involved with the Brazilian Revolution--as a spy for both sides; he sold to one side the secrets he had discovered from the other. After the Revolution collapsed he returned to Savannah Tennessee where he became a gentleman farmer at which he was never very successful (he lost the farm to debt); a writer at which he was acerbic (he never found his audience); and a parent at which he was peremptory (''He was easy to make mad'' said his son). Near the end of his stay in South America he wrote his mother: '' . . . a certain amount of turmoil and adventure are essential to my happiness.'' This book is an account of the turmoil and adventures of his remarkable life told mainly through his letters and his own writings.