NPT Reviews of Books and other Material

Hampton Sides, in his foreword to the recent spectacular photographic study of the Grand Canyon, Pete McBride’s The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim, writes “Let’s not hide our light under a bushel: the Grand Canyon of Arizona is our mightiest of landscapes.”

An estimated six million people visit the Grand Canyon annually. Most visitors look in from the South Rim or through the window of a helicopter, and roughly 26,000 float the Colorado River through all or part of the canyon. Very few in the recorded history of Grand Canyon exploration have walked its length (fewer than have walked on the moon, Kevin Fedarko tells photographer Pete McBride). Likely no one with the photographic skills of National Geographic photographer McBride have made this arduous journey, which covered 750 miles from Lees Ferry to the Grand Wash Cliffs at the canyon’s western end.

What do you envision when you enter a national park? What do you expect to experience? Why do we visit these places?

We all know what incredible cauldrons of beauty and history national parks hold for visitors to marvel at. You can view them as libraries of natural and cultural history. And like most libraries, you can get lost in the stacks if you don’t have a guide. Stephen Trimble has put together the guide you need to more fully appreciate Capitol Reef National Park in Utah. It’s not your typical national park guidebook. No trail, dining, or lodging information.

Any visitor to Yosemite inescapably encounters granite – it is the essence of the park. Few if any know granite like Michael P. Cohen, who has climbed big walls, wandered on and around its less than vertical presences, read deeply into its geomorphology and mineralogy, and intimately explored and reflected on the nature of Yosemite granite for over a half century. Granite and Grace is a meditation on what he has come to know of it in all these ways and years.

Redwood National and State Parks is not your typical national park. That's quite evident from its name. But when you look at a map of the park located in northern California, it becomes more clear. This is a narrow park that roams and meanders along the Pacific Coast, interspersing national and state parklands. And you need to know that if you're planning to do some hiking there. That's why you'll find the full-page map in John Soares' upcoming book on hiking this park so helpful.

A new book on the Green River examines the demands on that iconic stream that flows out of central Wyoming and adds its fill to the Colorado down in Canyonlands National Park. The text is a wonderful complement to the more lyrical book on the same river that arrived more than half-a-century ago.

It's time to move on to Molly Hashimoto's next course for mastering your sketching, painting, and drawing of birds you can spot in national parks in the West.

In today’s fraught political environment, scant attention is paid nationally to public land issues even as campaigns are mounted to exploit and even divest the American people of this part of their legacy. Political scientist Steven Davis takes on the divestiture part of the threat to public lands in this scholarly, readable, and brilliant treatment of this timely and important challenge.

If you savor American history, particularly the years of the Civil War, can you ever have enough books to help understand what transpired during those bloody years? In Civil War Places, Seeing the Conflict through the Eyes of its Leading Historians, a roster of historians who studied the war offer a rich collection of essays to lend some perspective to individual battles.