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NPT Reviews of Books and other Material

A collection of book reviews to help you pick the perfect read for your national park escape

Review | Wonders Of Sand And Stone: A History Of Utah’s National Parks And Monuments

The southern half of Utah is canyon country, a land of aridity, sparse vegetation, and unique and scenically spectacular topography and geology. It is a land rich in sites of archaeological importance and parts of it are sacred to indigenous people. It is also mostly public land, owned by the American people, part of their national legacy, and for a century it has been contested terrain.

Review | Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness

Leave it as It Is is the most engaging and powerful book about Western public lands that I have read in a long time. Gessner published a terrific book in 2015 titled All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West, and I find some Abbey and Stegner in this new book, both in style and content. He traveled the West in search of Abbey and Stegner in that book as he does with Teddy Roosevelt in this one. He looks at all these icons in the context of the modern West with a clear and analytical eye.

Why Trust Science?

Never in the history of science has asking the question “Why Trust Science?” been more important than in 2020 because science denial in the face of climate change, pandemics, and the loss of biodiversity, among other challenges facing the world, threatens lives and the future of human communities across the globe.

The Cold Vanish: Seeking The Missing In North America’s Wildlands

An astonishing 600,000 people go missing in North America each year, most of whom are quickly found, but those who disappear in the wilder parts of the continent are often much harder to find. Journalist John Billman admits to being “obsessed with writing about missing persons in wild places,” and in this book he travels thousands of miles from Hawaii to Washington State to the wilds of northern Ontario pursuing intriguing stories of “cold vanishing.” The “cold” is often of the “cold case” sort and sometimes literally people disappearing into wild, cold places.

Our Wild Calling: How Connecting With Animals Can Transform Our Lives―And Save Theirs

They were young bulls, possibly even siblings, and their own full-fledged, testosterone-fueled combative rut was probably a full year away. Yet back and forth they jostled in our yard, testing each other not 20 feet from the backdoor, their antlers clattering against each other, steam flushing in bursts from their nostrils in the cold fall air as their gangly legs sought leverage in the not-yet-frozen ground.

Tahoma And Its People: A Natural History Of Mount Rainier National Park

Mount Rainier towers above its surroundings. The 360-degree view from its summit is stunning, encompassing Puget Sound and the Olympic Mountains to the west, Mount Baker far to the north, the Columbia River country to the east, spreading south toward Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Hood down in Oregon. I saw all of this on a perfectly clear summit day and having done so makes me appreciate the approach Jeff Antonelis-Lapp takes in this book.

Erosion: Essays Of Undoing

National park enthusiasts will likely be familiar with the writing of Terry Tempest Williams. Her previous book The Hour of Land told national park stories as only she, in her lyrical, insightful, and emotional way, can tell them. Erosion is not explicitly about national parks, though some of the essays lament what has happened to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monuments. She has already addressed the challenges of many other parks in that earlier work. The 32 pieces in this book, most of them essays, address a “world being torn to pieces,” being eroded, a condition that brings Williams, at times, to heartbreak.

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