Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West

Taliaferro (Great White Fathers), a former senior editor at Newsweek, delivers an impressive, eminently readable biography of the great conservationist George Bird Grinnell (1849–1938). In rendering a life that was “a study in romanticism, evolution, and progressivism,” Taliaferro meticulously draws from 40,000 pages of correspondence, about 50 diaries and notebooks covering Grinnell’s travels, 35 years of articles and editorials from his magazine, Forest and Stream, and Grinnell’s many books, including the history The Fighting Cheyennes, seven novels for boys, and an unfinished autobiography. Grinnell lived on the East Coast, in New York State and Connecticut, but he lived for the West. In addition to bestowing his name, “in a rare breach of modesty,” on a glacier and a lake in Montana, Grinnell formed the Audubon Society, cofounded the Boone and Crockett Club with Theodore Roosevelt, and “midwifed” Glacier National Park, while helping protect Yosemite and Yellowstone from developers. He just missed being among the dead at Little Big Horn, yet listened intently to Native Americans throughout his life and lobbied for them in Washington, D.C. Anyone who’s ever set foot in a national park and wondered how it came to be will find an important part of the answer in this expansive look at an equally expansive life. (July)