The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America
Douglas Brinkley, 2009
HarperCollins
960 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060565312
Summary
In this groundbreaking epic biography, Douglas Brinkley draws on never-before-published materials to examine the life and achievements of our "naturalist president." By setting aside more than 230 million acres of wild America for posterity between 1901 and 1909, Theodore Roosevelt made conservation a universal endeavor.
This crusade for the American wilderness was perhaps the greatest U.S. presidential initiative between the Civil War and World War I. Roosevelt's most important legacies led to the creation of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and passage of the Antiquities Act in 1906. His executive orders saved such treasures as Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, and the Petrified Forest.
Tracing the role that nature played in Roosevelt's storied career, Brinkley brilliantly analyzes the influence that the works of John James Audubon and Charles Darwin had on the young man who would become our twenty-sixth president. With descriptive flair, the author illuminates Roosevelt's bird watching in the Adirondacks, wildlife obsession in Yellowstone, hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains, ranching in the Dakota Territory, hunting in the Big Horn Mountains, and outdoor romps through Idaho and Wyoming.
He also profiles Roosevelt's incredible circle of naturalist friends, including the Catskills poet John Burroughs, Boone and Crockett Club cofounder George Bird Grinnell, forestry zealot Gifford Pinchot, buffalo breeder William Hornaday, Sierra Club founder John Muir, U.S. Biological Survey wizard C. Hart Merriam, Oregon Audubon Society founder William L. Finley, and pelican protector Paul Kroegel, among many others. He brings to life hilarious anecdotes of wild-pig hunting in Texas andbadger saving in Kansas, wolf catching in Oklahoma and grouse flushing in Iowa. Even the story of the teddy bear gets its definitive treatment.
Destined to become a classic, this extraordinary and timeless biography offers a penetrating and colorful look at Roosevelt's naturalist achievements, a legacy now more important than ever. Raising a Paul Revere–like alarm about American wildlife in peril—including buffalo, manatees, antelope, egrets, and elk—Roosevelt saved entire species from probable extinction.
As we face the problems of global warming, overpopulation, and sustainable land management, this imposing leader's stout resolution to protect our environment is an inspiration and a contemporary call to arms for us all. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 14, 1960
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Raised—Perrysville, Ohio
• Education—B.A., Ohio State University; M.A., Ph.D.,
Georgetown University
• Currently—lives in Austin, Texas
Douglas Brinkley is a prolific and acclaimed historian, writer, and editor. Currently a professor of history at Rice University, he was previously a professor of history at Tulane University. There he also served as director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilization. Brinkley is the history commentator for CBS News and a contributing editor to the magazine Vanity Fair. He joined Rice and the James Baker Institute for Public Policy on July 1, 2007.
Brinkley was born in Atlanta, Georgia. His parents were high school teachers. Raised in Perrysburg, Ohio, he earned his B.A. from Ohio State University (1982), and his M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. (1989) from Georgetown University in U.S. Diplomatic History. He has taught at Princeton University, the U.S. Naval Academy, and Hofstra University, and he has earned several honorary doctorates for his contributions to American letters including Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
During the early 1990s, Brinkley taught American Arts and Politics out of Hofstra aboard the Majic Bus [sic], a roving transcontinental classroom, from which emerged the book, The Majic Bus: An American Odyssey (1993). In 1993, he left Hofstra to teach at the University of New Orleans, where he taught the class again using two natural-gas fueled buses. According to the Associated Press, "if you can't tour the United States yourself, the next best thing is to go along with Douglas Brinkley aboard The Majic Bus."
Brinkley worked closely with his mentor, historian Stephen E. Ambrose, then director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans. Ambrose chose Brinkley to become director of the Eisenhower Center, a post Brinkley manned for five years before moving to Tulane University.
Writing and editing
Brinkley and Ambrose wrote three books together: The Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938 (1997), Witness to History (1999), and The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation: From the Louisiana Purchase to Today (2002), a National Geographic Society best-seller (published on the bicentennial of Thomas Jefferson's doubling the size of America).
Brinkley’s first book was Jean Monnet: The Path to European Unity (1992).
It was the publication of Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years (1992) that brought Brinkley widespread acclaim. A board member of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, Brinkley then co-edited a monograph series with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and William vanden Heuvel in the 1990s. Brinkley also edited a volume entitled Dean Acheson and the Making of US Foreign Policy with Paul H. Nitze (1993).
Driven Patriot (1992), a biography of James Forrestal, received the Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt Naval History Prize.
In 1998, Brinkley's comprehensive American Heritage History of the United States was published.
The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House (1999) is widely considered instrumental in the ex-president's winning of the Nobel Peace prize.
Brinkley's epic Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and A Century of Progress (2003) won Business Week book of the year.
Brinkley was selected as the official biographer of Rosa Parks.
Brinkley is the literary executor for his late friend, the journalist Hunter S. Thompson. He is the editor of a three-volume collection of Thompson's letters.
Brinkley is also the authorized biographer for Beat generation author Jack Kerouac, having edited Kerouac's diaries as Windblown World (2004).
He has also written profiles of Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and Ken Kesey and Bob Dylan for Rolling Stone magazine.
In January 2004, Brinkley released Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, about U.S. Senator John Kerry's military service and anti-war activism during the Vietnam War. The 2004 documentary movie, Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, is loosely based on Brinkley's book
In January 2006, Brinkley and fellow historian Julie M. Fenster released Parish Priest, a biography of Father Michael J. McGivney, the founder of the Knights of Columbus.
In May 2006, Brinkley released The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a record of the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast. The book won the 2007 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was a Los Angeles Times book prize finalist. He also served as the primary historian for Spike Lee's documentary about Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.
Brinkley edited the New York Times best-selling The Reagan Diaries (2007).
Brinkley is also the author of The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion (2005), which rose to #5 on the New York Times Best Seller list.
Brinkley’s The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America was featured on the bestseller lists for National Independent bookstore (for non-fiction), The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.
Extras
• Stephen Ambrose called Brinkley "the best of the new generation of American historians."
• In contrast, historian Wilfred McClay in the New York Sun appraised Brinkley's scholarship as one that has failed to "put forward a single memorable idea, a single original analysis or a single lapidary phrase." Taking note of Brinkley's biography of John Kerry, the Weekly Standard noted that it contained "various factual inaccuracies and contradictions," describing it as a "famously sycophantic biography."
• Six of his books have been selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
For the patient reader Mr. Brinkley's fervent enthusiasm for his material eventually prevails over the book's sprawling data and slow pace. He clearly shares Roosevelt's rapture for mesmerizing settings like the North Dakota Badlands.... He conveys the great vigor with which Roosevelt approached his conservation mission. And he delves into the philosophical contradictions inherent in a man whose Darwinian thinking led him both to revere and kill the same creatures.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
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.... [T]his book has Rooseveltian energy. It is largehearted, full of the vitality of its subject and a palpable love for the landscapes it describes.
Jonathan Rosen - New York Times Book Review
Brinkley fully inhabits Roosevelt ’s mind, a condition that has its disadvantages—the book, with blow-by-blow accounts of college hiking trips and squabbles between naturalists, does not entirely earn its nine hundred pages, making it harder to see the forests (and the story of how T.R. rescued them) for the trees
The New Yorker
Brinkley has mastered the art of balancing scholarship and research with readability. In Wilderness Warrior, though, the author's affinity for his subject and the vastness of the literature on Roosevelt get in the way of a message that might have been made clearer with some prudent cutting
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Wilderness Warrior:
1. What does Brinkley mean when he says that "History still hasn't caught up with the long-term magnitude of [Roosevelt's] achievement"?
2. To what does Brinkley attribute T.R.'s drive to protect an astonishing 300 million acres of America's wilderness? How did his childhood passions and the loss of his first wife affect his later policies as president? Was there a coherent philosophy behind his convictions?
3. Brinkley suggests complex motives: "It's hard to escape the feeling that Roosevelt enjoyed creating national forests and... monuments in part because it was rubbing his opponents' faces in his wilderness philosophy of living." What do you think?
4. How does the author present Roosevelt's character, both as a man and a president? How would you describe Roosevelt's internal contradictions—his stance on hunting, for instance?
5. Talk about the political methods Roosevelt used to enact his conservation policies: would you describe them as "bold" (imaginative and gutsy) or "blunt" (dictatorial).
6. Who were the opponents of Roosevelt's conservation efforts—and what were their arguments? How similar is the situation today—those arrayed on either side of environmental issues, as well as their arguments pro and con?
7. What about John Lacey of Iowa? What role did he play in the history of American conservation? What are some of the other neglected figures who helped shape the country's conservation movement?
8. Describe Roosevelt's approach to Darwinism.
9. What do you make of the effort to save Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite National Park, which was eventually flooded to provide water for San Francisco. How does one balance conservation and growth? What was Roosevelt's attitude? What is the author's? What is yours?
10. How many of America's scenic jewels described in this book have you visited? Are there those you would particularly like to see? Does the author do a credible job of painting the landscapes in your mind's eye—in other words, does Brinkley create a sense of place?
11. What are some of the most interesting facets of Roosevelt's life—or of American history—that you learned from this book? What else surprised or enlightened you?
12. A number of reviewers found this book overly long, bogged down in details. Do you agree with them?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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