NPT Reviews of Books and other Material

As beautiful as most butterflies are, they are not always the flitting creatures of elegance we often presume. "Tempted as we are to think of butterflies as pureness and delight, it's worthwhile to watch for them on poop and carrion, which they feed on," points out David Lee Myers in this book of North American butterflies.

We can't forget about the ocean and its treasures.

A life that ultimately led to a new career as a national park ranger.

Jennifer Ladino spent 13 summers working for the National Park Service and is now an English professor at the University of Idaho. Memorials Matter is a scholarly work published by an academic press heavy on theory but also based on personal field research at six sites of historical significance.

Two books have been published in the past two years that draw much-deserved attention to Stewart Udall whose work as Secretary of Interior in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations stands in stark contrast to the occupants of that office in the Trump administration. Thomas Smith wrote a full biography of Udall titled Stewart Udall: Steward of the Land, published in 2017. Scott Raymond Einberger has focused his book almost exclusively on Udall’s conservation and environmental work, briefly touching on his life before President Kennedy named him to his cabinet. The two books are complementary and timely in the way they reveal how a Secretary of the Department of Interior can and should serve the American people.

Many national park enthusiasts can recite the history of the system or their favorite site by memory. They laud the conservationists and leaders who knew we must protect precious natural landscapes for future generations, they know the first national park (Yellowstone), and the year the National Park Service was founded (1916). But how many know of the contributions of people of color to our national parks?

This book is an atlas unlike any that I have seen. Its focus is not on a national park but on the state of Wyoming in which two national parks, Grand Teton and Yellowstone, are very much at the core of migrations of elk, bison, and mule deer. Many migrations in the state do not touch on these national parks, but the point of the book is that migratory ungulate populations, once nearly eradicated by overhunting and other factors, are mostly on the rebound.

This book, in honor of the centennial of the Save the Redwoods League, is a love story regaling the country’s tallest trees, the coastal redwoods and the giant sequoias farther inland.

The subtitle of this book was carefully chosen. “A Chart for Rough Waters” was the title of a 1940 book in which Waldo Frank argued that Western democracies must meet immediate challenges, such as the assaults on them by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, but at the same time “address underlying causes that will require progress that ‘fills the lives of even our youngest children.’” Machlis and Jarvis offer a similar message for conservation – battle the assault on conservation by the Trump administration in the courts and the fields of public opinion, but at the same time work with “strategic intention” for a conservation agenda that will serve the long term.

Five years ago I visited for the first time the “Puebloan Heartland,” defined in this book as the area between Mesa Verde to the north and Chaco Canyon to the south. I knew of Mesa Verde National Park and Chaco Canyon National Historical Park but was unaware that these famous Ancestral Puebloan places bounded other sites of archaeological significance. My wife suggested we visit Aztec National Monument, which puzzled me. What were the Aztecs doing way up here in northern New Mexico? Aztec turned out to be a remarkable site, and I knew I had a lot to learn.