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Summary
Summary
"Douglas Brinkley brings to this magnificent story of Theodore Roosevelt's crusade on behalf of America's national parks the same qualities that made TR so fascinating a figure--an astonishing range of knowledge, a superb narrative skill, a wonderfully vivid writing style and an inexhaustible energy."
--Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals
A vast, inspiring, and enormously entertaining book."
-- New York Times Book Review
From New York Times bestselling historian Douglas Brinkley comes a sweeping historical narrative and eye-opening look at the pioneering environmental policies of President Theodore Roosevelt, avid bird-watcher, naturalist, and the founding father of America's conservation movement--now approaching its 100th anniversary.
Author Notes
Douglas Brinkley was born in Atlanta, Georgia on December 14, 1960. He received a B.A. from Ohio State University in 1982 and a Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989. He was a professor at Tulane University, Princeton University, the U.S. Naval Academy, Hofstra University, and the University of New Orleans. In 2007, he became a professor at Rice University and the James Baker Institute for Public Policy. He is a commentator for CBS News and a contributing editor to the magazine Vanity Fair.
His first book, Jean Monnet: The Path to European Unity, was published in 1992. His other works include Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House, Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, Cronkite, and Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America. He also wrote three books with historian Stephen E. Ambrose: The Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, Witness to History, and The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today. He has won several awards including the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt Naval History Prize for Driven Patriot and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Award-winning author Brinkley (The Great Deluge, Gerald Ford) turns a bright light on a facet of Roosevelt's nine-year presidency that was arguably his greatest contribution to the country: his "visionary" take on "our national wilderness heritage" that led him to preserve 234 million acres of land for posterity (that's one out of ten acres). Using the power of the presidency, he declared Florida's Pelican Island a Federal Bird Reservation, created 37 new national forests (including 17 million acres of pristine Alaska) and saved the Grand Canyon from mining outfits. A larger-than-life figure, almost manic in his exuberance and known for his battlefield valor in the Spanish American War, it is less well-known that Roosevelt was a serious naturalist and author, who trained in Darwinian biology at Harvard. The "heart and soul of the burgeoning conservation movement," Roosevelt combined intelligence, enthusiasm and hunting-buddy charm to influence congress as well as the "backwoods types" he met on hunting trips out West. Brinkley's full, rounded warts-and-all portrait of Roosevelt is sure to interest history buffs and environmentalists. (July) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* How to reconcile Teddy Roosevelt, the big-game hunter, with President Roosevelt, the revolutionary environmentalist? Gifted and versatile historian Brinkley foregrounds Roosevelt's profound passion for nature in a biography as expansive and radiant as the glorious landscapes Roosevelt zealously preserved. The length of this engrossing portrait indicates the primacy of Roosevelt's conservation efforts, yet Brinkley is the first to explicate the full story, and just in time. As environmental concerns intensify, Roosevelt's battles to preserve forests, grasslands, mountains, and the habitats of birds, fish, and diverse animal species, so lucidly chronicled here, provide crucial guidance. Brinkley writes with particular empathy about how precocious, asthmatic Roosevelt discovered the healing powers of nature, and trained himself to become an irrepressible naturalist, and covers with fluent insights Roosevelt's extensive travels, sparkling writing, and professionalization of forestry and wildlife protection. A poetic warrior on a great wildlife crusade who believed that conservation efforts are essentially democratic in spirit, purpose, and method, Roosevelt created national forests (150), bird reserves (51), and parks and monuments (24), preserving such wonders as the Grand Canyon. Teddy Roosevelt's mighty legacy consists of the places he saved and the ecological vision he shared.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
It is hard to believe today that there was a time when securing Pelican Island, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon were controversial decisions denounced as a federal land grab inimical to states' rights and economic growth. Of course every generation has its own idea of progress, beauty and necessity. What made Theodore Roosevelt a conservationist hero was his conviction that pelicans, 2,000-year-old redwood trees and ancient rock formations belonged to future generations of Americans as well as to the past. Weighed against eternity, what were the arguments of mining magnates, plume hunters, local businesses and assorted congressmen? From the time he became president, in 1901, until he left office 100 years ago, Roosevelt saved over 234 million acres of wild America. How a city-born child of privilege became one of the greatest forces in American conservation is the subject of Douglas Brinkley's vast, inspiring and enormously entertaining book, "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America." The subtitle is telling - the crusade for America, not "wild America" - because for Roosevelt, living forests and petrified forests, bird preserves and buffalo ranges were essential for the country's survival as a moral and military power. It all began, like so many conservationist journeys, with birds. When he was 12, the nearsighted boy received a pair of eyeglasses and discovered the beauty and abundance of avifauna. Roosevelt learned taxidermy from a man who had traveled with John James Audubon, and he came to feel a personal link to the great naturalist-artist. Though he grew up in Manhattan on the far side of "On the Origin of Species" and the Civil War, and was only 32 when the director of the 1890 census announced the death of the frontier, Roosevelt felt a deep nostalgia for the age of hunter-explorers for whom science, divine purpose and nation-building were all of a piece. Roosevelt decided at an early age that he was going to be a naturalist. His father was a founder of the American Museum of Natural History and also a supporter of the animal rights activist Henry Bergh, the eccentric creator of the A.S.P.C.A. Brinkley's book abounds in portraits of important, neglected figures who shaped Roosevelt's conservation ethic, from the once popular children's book author Capt. Mayne Reid, who peppered his outdoor adventures with the Latinate names of plants and animals, to Roosevelt's eccentric, fish-loving uncle, Robert B. Roosevelt, a pioneering ichthyologist, a crusader against overfishing, and a womanizer who presented his conquests with green gloves (which gives a whole new meaning to going green). All his life Roosevelt sought out and learned from naturalists, and it is wonderful to see John Burroughs and Frank Chapman and George Bird Grinnell get their due. They pointed him to places that needed saving, they hunted and camped with him and they made him feel part of a fraternity of naturalists that organically grew into a fraternity of conservationists. Roosevelt with the conservationist John Muir at Glacier Point in Yosemite, 1906. A turning point in Roosevelt's life, narrated here with great feeling, was his visit to the Dakota Badlands in 1883 to hunt buffalo, already rare. When his young wife died the following year, he retreated to the Badlands to heal himself spiritually and develop himself physically, hurling himself into ranching, hunting and writing. In some sense the Badlands saved him, and Roosevelt's determination in later years to preserve as much of the West as he could - bringing back buffalo to Oklahoma, declaring Devils Tower in Wyoming a national monument - was in part a desire to return the favor. By the time he took over the presidency after McKinley's assassination in 1901, Roosevelt was primed for environmental action. He created the National Wildlife Refuge System and made the United States Forest Service and the Biological Survey progressive and energetic agents for wildlife and habitat protection. The maps at the end of the book, illustrating the national forests, federal bird reservations and national parks and monuments Roosevelt created or expanded, are eloquent testament to his success, though Brinkley also looks at Roosevelt's environmental failures, often caused by Western "reclamation" projects. He failed to secure the beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley inside Yosemite National Park, which was eventually flooded to provide water and hydroelectric power for San Francisco. Roosevelt, for all his radicalism, was a pragmatist who believed in preservation and growth, then as now a difficult balance. Brinkley, a professor of history at Rice University, has absorbed a huge amount of research, but encyclopedic inclusiveness and repetition occasionally mar narrative movement, and a 940-page book does not need sentences like this one describing Cuban crustaceans: "Unlike the stone crabs of Maine, these red crabs, by contrast, weren't particularly good-tasting; from a culinary perspective they were off-putting." And the book dances with ideas, without always exploring them. Brinkley refers often to Roosevelt's Darwinism. Roosevelt certainly saw himself as a disciple of Darwin, but Brinkley sometimes uses Darwinism as if it were synonymous with environmentalism - as if to acknowledge the interconnectedness of human beings and animals is to conclude that both must be saved together. What is scarcely explored is how peculiarly American Roosevelt's Darwinism was, combining a belief in natural selection with the intuition that God made the world and that human beings - especially Americans - were inevitably stewards of it. Brinkley quotes Roosevelt writing a year before his death: "Thank Heaven I sat at the feet of Darwin and Huxley." Roosevelt was not being ironic; he could thank God for Darwin. Just as he could be a hunter and a conservationist; indeed the two activities encouraged each other. BUT this book has Rooseveltian energy. It is largehearted, full of the vitality of its subject and a palpable love for the landscapes it describes. As in Roosevelt's own life, personality trumps all - what remains unforgettable in "The Wilderness Warrior" is the image of Roosevelt, in 1903, camping in the snows of Yosemite with John Muir. Muir set a dead pine tree on fire like a giant torch, and the two men danced before it. (Later, Roosevelt agreed to place Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove under federal control, as Muir wished.) It was a simpler age for environmentalists. Roosevelt talked about lordly elk and manifest destiny, a far cry from today's scientists with their complex computer models of climate change. Saving redwoods is one thing, properly inflating your tires something else. Roosevelt made conservation a vital, almost violent pursuit. It went with being manly, brave, patriotic. It was as populated with animals as any children's book. It was scientific and yet saturated with religious meaning, patrician but populist, global and yet fueled by jingoistic fervor. It was fun. It is hard to know how useful Roosevelt remains as a political model. (His critics often had a point - Mark Twain, who liked Roosevelt personally, felt he was ready to "kick the Constitution into the backyard whenever it gets in the way.") What this book makes abundantly clear is that his inspiration, vision and courage were as rare 100 years ago as they are today and that without them our country would be uglier, and poorer. Most usefully, it is a vital reminder of the key element of conservation, so often neglected: You cannot save what you do not love. For Roosevelt, forests and bird preserves were essential for the country's survival as a moral and military power. Jonathan Rosen is the editorial director of Nextbook and the author, most recently, of "The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature."
Kirkus Review
An appropriately vigorous and larger-than-lifebut also detailed and carefully documentedbiography of the visionary president who put so much land and so many resources in the public trust. Brinkley (History/Rice Univ.; The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, 2006, etc.) makes an important contribution to our understanding of Theodorenever "Teddy" to anyone who knew him, Brinkley cautionsRoosevelt as conservationist and preservationist by providing both a personal and an intellectual genealogy. On the personal side, Roosevelt was descended from Dutch New Yorkers who worked the land and knew its ways. His father was a founding member of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where young Theodore logged considerable time. On the intellectual front, he was an ardent student of animal life. "At a very early age," Brinkley writes, "Theodore Roosevelt started studying the anatomy of more than 600 species of birds in North America. You might say that his natural affinity for ornithology was part of his metabolism." Certainly, his active interest in the outdoors and constant sojourns in wild places helped Roosevelt overcome youthful sickliness. Moreover, he became a vocal champion of evolutionary theory, then fairly new. Treading carefully, Brinkley suggests how Roosevelt's understanding of Darwin's contributions to biology figured in with his social-Darwinist notions of empire, manifest destiny and the white man's burden. The author also shows us how, as president, Roosevelt brought so much of the public domain under the strong protection of the federal government, adding millions of acres to the national parks, forests and lands systems. He did this in part by building and working a network of like-minded preservationists. Brinkley highlights the work of long-forgotten congressional allies such as Rep. John F. Lacey of Iowa, who "did more to protect migratory birds than any other politician in American history besides Theodore Roosevelt." Magisterial and timely, given the manifold environmental crises facing the current administration. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Brinkley (history, Rice Univ.; The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast) details President Roosevelt's status as an American folk hero, his battles with political and corporate dissenters, and the friends and enemies he made in his fight to preserve the U.S. wilderness through the creation of national parks and monuments, bird and game reservations, and national forests. Brinkley heaps praise on Roosevelt for his preservation of over 230 million acres of wilderness, detailing Roosevelt's reading, his naturalist hobbies, and the people he drew around him who crucially worked to save American wilderness areas. Verdict While this very readable biography showcases an impressive amount of research, at over 900 pages, the pace is slowed down by simply too much information about the scientists, politicians, and explorers Roosevelt knew and by the extravagant descriptions of wildlife. Best suited for academics, armchair historians, or the most avid of biography enthusiasts. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/08.]-Crystal Goldman, San Jose St. Univ. Lib., CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.