Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Theodore Roosevelt: Wilderness Writings ed. by Paul Schullery

1987; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 22; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1987.0031

1948-7142

Orvis Burmaster,

American History and Culture

Reviews 87 lands around Bakersfield in the Great Central Valley of California. . . . Engineers report that it carries, at maximum, 5000 cubic feet of water per second. In that method of precise calculation is hinted the determination on the part of engineers, farmers, and other modern Westerners to wrest every possible return from the canal and its flow. The American West literally lives today by that determina­ tion. Though its importance has seldom been well understood, more than any other single element, it has been the shaping force in the region’shistory. Hooked? You should be, for this is a major theoretical work, well-argued and generally well-written, a must for any bookshelf that seeks thoroughness in matters western. Water unlocked arid land, but it may have locked in many people at the same time. Read Worster and decide for yourself. GERALD HASLAM Sonoma State University Theodore Roosevelt: Wilderness Writings. Edited and with introduction by Paul Schullery. (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1986. 292 pages, $5.95 paper.) In this volume of the Peregrine Smith Literature of the American Wilder­ ness series, Paul Schullery has divided selections from Roosevelt’s writing into three categories: wilderness adventures, wilderness preservation, and natural history. Roosevelt the adventurer is romantic and ebullient. Adventure is a young man’s game, he warns, and most of us would agree. But at 55, he helped lead a perilous and grueling expedition down an unexplored Brazilian river. “The joy of living,” he concludes, “is his who has the heart to demand it.” Theodore Roosevelt had that sort of heart. He admired the hunters and explorers whose “conquest of the wilder­ ness” paved the way for civilization. And he treasured that wilderness as a tempering element necessary to maintain strength of both personal and national character. As a politician, he argued persuasively that land reserves and game preserves “are, and should be, created primarily for economic pur­ poses,” since the reserves conserve water, forests, and game, and provide “a permanent health resort and playground for the people of a large part of the Union.” Roosevelt was an observant and tireless naturalist who could describe with equal enthusiasm the songs of the meadow lark and mocking bird and the stalking and shooting of a bull elk. Smithsonian biologist Edmund Heller considered him “the world’s foremost authority on large mammals.” In short, as a recent biographer has noted, Theodore Roosevelt had “the richest and most varied background any individual had brought to the Presidency since 88 Western American Literature the time of Thomas Jefferson.” Paul Schullery’s introduction and the selec­ tions he includes in this volume give us some fascinating glimpses into that background and into the remarkably complex mind and personality of our twenty-sixth President. ORVIS BURMASTER Boise State University On the Mesa. By John Nichols. (Layton, Utah: Peregrine Smith, 1986. 193 pages, $14.95 hardcover.) Nichols begins with an account of a breakdown in his “equilibrium between holocaust and halleleuiah,” and his subsequent decision to retreat (actually many retreats, each lasting only a few hours) to the sagebrush desert on Taos Mesa a few miles from his home. For too long he has been worrying about Nicaragua and trying to write responsible filmscripts, or worrying about the environment and making speeches; it is time to find a little space, a little healing for himself. But he discovers that even Taos Mesa is no longer marginal enough to be safe: on that first return he encounters one surveyor for an oil company, and two for an electric company which plans a high-tension line across the mesa. A couple of visits later, he encounters a middle-aged radical named Cassandra, a caustic friend and possible lover, who throws him even more off stride than do his enemies. The book tries hard, in its 193 pages, to elaborate on these various ele­ ments in Nichols’life. We visit his special Mesa stockpond when it is dust-dry, then when filled by a thunderstorm. We frequent it over the next few months as it slowly dries again. (Nichols here works within the nature-writing tradi­ tion of lovingly-detailed observation, yet seems always slightly outside the material). We...