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
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