OUTDOORS & ADVENTURE
National Parks
8 books
Eight books about the American national park system — the specific history of how the parks came to be, the landscapes they preserve, the controversies about what preservation means and for whom, and the experience of visiting them. The national park is one of America's most genuinely original contributions to world culture — the idea that land could be set aside not for economic exploitation but for its own sake and for the public's experience of it — and the books on this list engage with that idea honestly, including its contradictions. The parks protected land by removing the people who had lived on it, which is a story these books don't ignore.
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Cadillac Desert
Marc Reisner
The American West holds 70 million people in a desert because the federal government spent the 20th century building the most extensive water infrastructure in human history — dams, aqueducts, irrigation systems — that allowed Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas to exist in places that have no natural business supporting them. Reisner published this in 1986 and the situation has gotten considerably worse since. The first half — the dam-building era, the political battles over the Colorado River, the Bureau of Reclamation as an empire unto itself — reads like a thriller. The second half explains why the whole system is running out of road. The most important book about the American West that most people have never read, and the one that makes every subsequent conversation about Western water, drought, and growth make immediate sense.
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The Last Season
Roy MacGregor
MacGregor is Canada's foremost hockey writer and this 1983 novel is his best fiction: a fading player named Frank Batterinski, thirty-three, playing his last season in a European league, looking back at the career that should have been more. The hockey is specific and credible throughout. The real subject is what a man does when the thing he was built for begins to leave him — the diminishment of a body that once worked perfectly, the reckoning with a life organized entirely around a game. Unknown to most American readers, which makes it the deep cut on this list and the fiction entry simultaneously. The Last Season makes no argument and delivers no lesson. It shows you a man at the end of something and lets that be enough. Cross-seeds with the Coming-of-Age Fiction list.
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Empire of Shadows
George Black
Yellowstone was established as America's first national park in 1872 — before anyone had figured out what a national park was or how to protect it. Black spent years reconstructing the first four decades of the park's existence: the explorers who mapped it, the Army that administered it for thirty years in the absence of any civilian authority, the poachers and market hunters who stripped it of wildlife, and the specific political battles that determined what kind of place it would eventually become. Around 464 pages and the deep cut entry on this list — the most thorough account of Yellowstone's founding era available and largely unknown outside park history circles. The reader who has visited Yellowstone and taken its preservation for granted will finish this book with a more accurate understanding of how close it came to becoming something else entirely.
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The National Parks: America's Best Idea
Dayton Duncan
Duncan wrote this as the companion to Ken Burns's landmark PBS documentary series and the result stands on its own as the most comprehensive account of the national parks system available: the full arc from the Yosemite Grant in 1864 through the establishment of Yellowstone in 1872, the political battles that saved the Grand Canyon from a dam, the specific men and women who fought to keep the parks public when private development interests had the money and the political connections to win. Around 528 pages and the overview entry on this list — the book that explains what the parks are, how they got there, and why the fight to preserve them never fully ends. The AoM reader who has driven through the parks without knowing their history will read this and understand what he has been standing in.
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The Wilderness Warrior
Douglas Brinkley
When Roosevelt became president in 1901 he was already the most enthusiastic naturalist in American public life — a man who had spent years in the Dakota Badlands, climbed in the Rockies, and published serious ornithological research. Over the next seven years he used the presidency to protect 230 million acres of American wilderness: national parks, national monuments, national forests, and wildlife refuges created by executive order faster than Congress could object. Brinkley spent years reconstructing the full conservation presidency and the result is the definitive account of how the American parks system was built — the specific battles with mining and timber interests, the alliance with Muir, and the specific executive machinery Roosevelt used to move faster than his opponents. Around 780 pages and worth every one of them. Cross-seeds with the American History and Biography lists.
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The Man Who Walked Through Time
Colin Fletcher
In 1963, Colin Fletcher became the first person to walk the length of the Grand Canyon — below the rim, on foot, alone, resupplied by air drops — over two months. This is his account of what that journey required and what it produced: the specific physical conditions of the inner canyon, the specific solitude of weeks without human contact, and the specific quality of thought that emerges when a man removes everything except the immediate demands of the terrain. Around 247 pages and the primary source entry on this list — a man describing a specific physical achievement in a specific place with the precision of someone who understood that the Canyon was the subject and he was just the instrument of observation. Fletcher later walked the length of California and wrote The Thousand-Mile Summer, the companion entry for the reader who wants more. The solitude entry and the specific park entry simultaneously.
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Encounters with the Archdruid
John McPhee
David Brower was the executive director of the Sierra Club, the most effective wilderness advocate of the twentieth century, and the man most responsible for saving the Grand Canyon from a Bureau of Reclamation dam. McPhee took him on three separate wilderness trips — each time in the company of a man whose professional interests conflicted directly with Brower's — and wrote about the conversations. A mining engineer in the Cascades. A resort developer on a Georgia barrier island. Floyd Dominy, the Bureau of Reclamation chief who built Glen Canyon Dam, on a Colorado River raft trip below the canyon he flooded. Around 245 pages and the most formally ingenious book on this list: the political fight over American wilderness rendered as walking debate, with McPhee's surgical prose giving both sides exactly as much room as they need. Cross-seeds with the Essays & Longform Journalism list.
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Edward Abbey's Road
Edward Abbey
Abbey drove the roads of the American Southwest — through Utah canyon country, across the Sonoran Desert, into the parks and monuments of the Colorado Plateau — and wrote about what he found with the specific combination of fury and joy that made him the most cantankerous voice in American outdoor writing. This 1979 collection is the road trip entry and the humor entry simultaneously: Abbey raging at the motor tourists clogging the parks he loved, at the Park Service accommodating them, at the mining companies waiting outside the boundaries, and at himself for being unable to stay away from any of it. Around 209 pages and the lightest book on this list — light being a relative term for a man who called industrial civilization a suicide pact. Desert Solitaire on the Wilderness & Nature Writing list is Abbey at his most philosophical. This is Abbey at his most entertaining.