You are here

NPT Reviews of Books and other Material

A collection of book reviews to help you pick the perfect read for your national park escape

Review | U.S. Rangers, The Law of the Land: The History Of Law Enforcement In The Federal Land Management Agencies

The latest edition of a book that explores the history of rangers in the land-management agency illustrates problems with law enforcement in the National Park Service, but comes across as one-sided and with an axe to grind.

Review | Brave The Wild River: The Untold Story Of Two Women Who Mapped The Botany Of The Grand Canyon

In 2023 if a woman wishes to run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, she can, and many do. If she decides she wants to be a scientist, or a science journalist, she can do that too. Melissa Sevigny, a science journalist, rafted the Colorado through the Grand Canyon to visualize the journey two botanists, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, made in 1938, the first women to successfully boat the canyon.

Review: George Melendez Wright: The Fight For Wildlife And Wilderness In National Parks

In the beginning, national parks were mostly about scenery — not entirely because some early parks like Yellowstone, Mount Rainier, and Crater Lake featured unusual marvels of the natural world. But the focus was on scenic beauty and providing opportunities for visitors to enjoy it. From those earliest days wildlife, particularly big critters like bears and elk, were one of the attractions in some parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite where they were on “display” at, for instance, the Yellowstone garbage dumps. Wildlife protection was an afterthought if a thought at all in the establishment and management of national parks. George Melendez Wright changed this, at least for a while.

Fireside Read | Guardians of the Valley: John Muir And The Friendship That Saved Yosemite

A library of books has been written about John Muir, many of which mention Robert Underwood Johnson, but not many adequately describe his long collaboration with Muir. In this book, Dean King remedies that oversight. Muir’s life story and his contributions to the preservation of what is now Yosemite National Park have often been chronicled and King presents the highlights of that story. What King adds to the Muir story is who Robert Underwood Johnson was and what his role and contributions were in helping Muir in his many battles for protection of Yosemite.

Review | National Park Maps

As nice as those folding park maps you get when driving into a national park are, trying to collect them all and organize them for your road trips can be a challenge, to say the least. sure, you could punch holes in them and organize them in a three-ring binder, but an easier approach to exploring the parks is National Park Maps, a forthcoming atlas of the 63 "national parks."

Review | Headed Into The Wind: A Memoir

Jack Loeffler has explored the Southwest landscape and come to see it as “an integrated biogeographical system” in which Indigenous people “developed profound spiritual relationships with their homelands.” Avowing that he is not a religious man in the conventional sense, he has come to a recognition “of the sacred within the flow of Nature,” and this book explains how he got there.

Review | Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Richard Nixon, And The Great Environmental Awakening

One of historian Douglas Brinkley’s “fortes,” as he puts it, is presidential history, and one project has been to focus on the conservation and environmental records of presidential players in 20th century America.

The Essential RVing Guide

The Essential RVing Guide to the National Parks

The National Parks RVing Guide, aka the Essential RVing Guide To The National Parks, is the definitive guide for RVers seeking information on campgrounds in the National Park System where they can park their rigs. It's available for free for both iPhones and Android models.

This app is packed with RVing specific details on more than 250 campgrounds in more than 70 parks.

You'll also find stories about RVing in the parks, some tips if you've just recently turned into an RVer, and some planning suggestions. A bonus that wasn't in the previous eBook or PDF versions of this guide are feeds of Traveler content: you'll find our latest stories as well as our most recent podcasts just a click away.

So whether you have an iPhone or an Android, download this app and start exploring the campgrounds in the National Park System where you can park your rig.