A grizzly bear attack is a frightful, horrible thing, often ending in death. Long claws raking the body, the cracking of bones, dragging off the victim to consume, then burying it under a thin layer of forest duff.

This is the image that keeps some out of the backcountry of Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, and which keeps many of those who do venture beyond road's end on edge.

Fortunately, there are few grizzly attacks these days. But there was a time when practices in the parks raised the odds of being attacked, if only a little. Meal leftovers and kitchen waste were routinely dumped not far from kitchens, and nightly "shows" where visitors watched grizzlies come to these dumping grounds for meals were routine. And when these dumps were shut down, suddenly, the bears went after those it associated with those free meals: humans.

In Engineering Eden: The True Story Of A Violent Death, A Trial, And The Fight Over Controlling Nature, Jordan Fisher Smith masterfully makes this connection through a deep and thorough analysis of wildlife management in the national parks.

Building his story around the wrongful death trial of Harry Eugene Walker, a young Alabama man who was fatally mauled and partially consumed in Yellowstone in 1972, Smith traces the development of wildlife management in the park system from the early days of Aldo Leopold and Olaus and Adolph Murie up through Starker Leopold and the unprecedented and groundbreaking bear research conducted by John and Frank Craighead.

In doing so, Smith documents the pitted struggles between the Craigheads and park managers in Yellowstone who, history shows, ignored the threats of suddenly closing the bear dumps and wrongly assumed the bears that relied on them would immediately turn back to natural foods.

The learning curve for Yellowstone and Glacier park managers was a painfully slow one. The author points this out as he recalls the 1967 fatal maulings in one night of two young women in Glacier, the near-fatal mauling of a 10-year-old boy and a young seasonal ranger in the same incident in Glacier in 1960, and that of Harry Walker in Yellowstone in June 1972.

Painstakingly researched from Park Service records, court cases, and personal interviews, Smith's book diligently and exhaustively traces decades of bear management in the Western half of the National Park System and portrays how the bear dumps park managers viewed as tourist attractions were powder kegs that went off when the decision was made to close them. Olaus Murie had called on Yellowstone officials in 1943 to close the dump feeding grounds, saying the bears didn't need them. The Craigheads did the same in 1967 in a 113-page report to Yellowstone's superintendent, John McLaughlin, though it recommended he close the dumps gradually and lure the grizzlies away from the front country sites by using helicopters to ferry carrion into the backcountry to serve as "bait stations."

McLaughlin and his successor, Jack Anderson, shrugged off the Craigheads' recommendations, and bear attacks increased, the author notes.

Engineering Eden is as much a book about the evolution of wildlife management, particularly that concerning bears, within the National Park Service as it is a vindication of the Craigheads, who were driven out of Yellowstone by Superintendent Anderson because they refused to bow to his requests not to speak out against the Park Service and criticize their handling of grizzlies. Sadly, their fears of how grizzlies would react when the dumps vanished almost overnight came to be.

For students of wildlife management, and of the national parks, this is a great book to have.