Book of the week: The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America by Douglas Brinkley

(Harper, 940 pages, $34.99)

Theodore Roosevelt wanted it known that bringing home the head of a buffalo was no easy feat. In the 1880s, after tracking and gunning down a particularly “lordly” specimen in the Dakota Badlands, the aristocratic young New Yorker wrote a memoir in which he confessed that it had been “tedious and tiresome work” to separate the beast’s noggin from its bullet-pocked body. “The very toil I had been obliged to go through,” he wrote, “made me feel all the prouder when it was finally in my ­possession.” The future president, then in his late 20s, had always been a nature lover, says historian Douglas Brinkley. But hunting big game in the Badlands steeled him to become America’s greatest warrior for wilderness preservation.­

Brinkley’s mammoth new book clearly could have been shorter, said Jonathan Rosen in The New York Times. Even though it dwells exclusively on TR’s crusade­ for conservation, it’s often slowed by the author’s “encyclopedic inclusiveness.” But The Wilderness Warrior is saved by its “Rooseveltian energy.” Brinkley exhibits a “palpable love” for the same majestic landscapes that had captured his subject’s imagination, and his Roosevelt exudes passion. The boy who, at 12, fell for the quiet study of ornith­ology turned conservation into “a vital, almost violent pursuit” when he became president. His efforts to protect millions of acres of wilderness from industrial and business interests was, for Roosevelt, “scientific and yet saturated with religious meaning.” It benefited mankind, yet did so by celebrating the open spaces and natural landmarks that marked America as unique.

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Roosevelt’s passion seems to have been rooted in a teenage discovery of Charles Darwin’s writings, said Claude R. Marx in The Washington Times. His brand of Darwinism included some ugly ideas about race, but it also animated his sense that humanity, and Americans in particular, had a divine obligation to preserve existing species. Doing so meant aiding God in pursuing progress through evolution. Brinkley “is too good a historian to ignore the inconsistencies and contradictions” between Roosevelt’s beliefs and actions, said Glenn C. Altschuler in the Baltimore Sun. Even so, he remains a fan, giving us a Roosevelt who is both “large enough to contain contradictions and arrogant enough to ignore them.”