The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and The Crusade for America By Douglas Brinkley; Harper; 940 pages
It is a testament to the unparalleled hugeness of his life that a nearly thousand-page biography of Theodore Roosevelt is still capable of breaking new ground. Teddy as trust buster, canal builder, militarist and big-stick carrier is familiar enough. Less well known are his epic efforts, detailed here by historian Douglas Brinkley, as a conservationist-preservationist. By the end of his second presidential term, Roosevelt had "set aside more than 234 million acres of America for posterity." Half the size of the Louisiana Purchase, these federally protected lands included national monuments and parks such as the Grand Canyon, Crater Lake, Mesa Verde, Devils Tower and scores of national forests, bird reservations and game preserves. Eschewing the familiar biographical notes (the Panama Canal rates barely a passing mention), Brinkley shows us how T.R.'s youthful obsession with birds, hunting and Darwinian science joined forces with his unique form of masculine patriotism to result in a very "rare instance of constructive hyper-Americanism."
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