Douglas Brinkley’s new book clocks in at over 900 pages, appropriate considering the enormity of his subject: Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to preserve America’s wilderness. “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America” is “interesting and thorough,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. A professor of history, Brinkley sets the record straight on Roosevelt (don’t call him Teddy, for starters) and his role as a conservationist president. The New York Times praises the book’s “Rooseveltian energy”: “It is largehearted, full of the vitality of its subject and a palpable love for the landscapes it describes.” The Los Angeles Times, too, says that Brinkley “wanted to write his book as Roosevelt would have written it himself—in strong, taut masculine prose, resonating with the same fierce resolve as one of Roosevelt’s executive orders: ‘I do so declare'”:
Brinkley wanted to make it a big book too—a book so big, in fact, that if it were an animal Roosevelt probably would have tried to shoot it.
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