Priscilla Kipp

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Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the brilliant inventor of the telephone. The “speaking telegraph” was a game changer for the mid-19th century and indelibly altered the way humans communicate. Yet there was a darker side to Bell, obscured by the glow of his genius. In The Invention of Miracles: Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell’s Quest to End Deafness, Katie Booth vigorously revises the historical record.

Booth’s research journey is also personal. The book opens as her grandmother is dying, isolated and ignored by hospital staff because she is deaf. Booth seethes with outrage at the doctors’ indifference to her grandmother’s needs and comes to blame Bell for shaping such discriminatory behavior toward deaf people.

Bell’s wife and mother were deaf, though not congenitally. They inspired what Booth calls his “quest to end deafness,” an honest intention that would go badly awry. Determined to bring deaf people into the speaking and hearing world, Bell followed his father’s techniques as an elocutionist. He met his future wife, Mabel, when she was a child, and as her teacher, he insisted she learn to speak. The schools Bell began and the teachers he trained were opposed to the use of sign language and instead supported “oralism,” the use of speech alone, even for children who were born deaf and had never heard a word. Students caught using sign language got their hands slapped.

Bolstered by the power of his fame as an inventor, Bell was heralded as a champion of people who were deaf. But those who believed in the power of sign language, as a way to communicate and as a tool to bring the Deaf community together, opposed his methods. Bell denied the existence of a Deaf culture and saw deafness as a defect that needed to be erased, by speech or, later, by eugenics.

Booth reveals a rich history of heights and depths in The Invention of Miracles, including the questionable patent process that secured Bell’s name in history, the evolution and empowerment of the Deaf community, and Bell’s endearing marriage, which survived his own misguided intentions.

Alexander Graham Bell is best known as the brilliant inventor of the telephone, yet there was a darker side to him, obscured by the glow of his genius.
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The story of how young Kurdish women brought down terrorists from the Islamic State group has been waiting to be told. If Kobani, Syria, is a city that has gone unnoticed in the saga of Middle Eastern wars, then The Daughters of Kobani: A Story of Rebellion, Courage, and Justice will change that. It’s the story of a new generation of combatants, long denied choices about education, marriage or their very futures, who vanquished hosts of kidnappers, rapists and enslavers. Yet when author and journalist Gayle Tzemach Lemmon was asked to tell their story, she hesitated. “It just doesn’t make sense that the Middle East would be home to AK-47-wielding women driven with fervor and without apology or hesitation to make women’s equality a reality—and that the Americans would be the ones backing them.” She decided to go see for herself.

By 2016, civil war was tearing Syria apart, leaving room for ISIS, with help from allies such as Russia and Iran, to swagger in. President Barack Obama pledged that there would be no American troops on the ground; American support would have to come from the air, with airstrikes and weapons drops, while consultants and diplomats strategized from afar. On the front lines in Kobani were women like Azeema, trained as an expert sniper, and her childhood friend Rojda, whose mother still called her every day.

Based on hours of on-the-ground reporting and countless interviews with Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) fighters, Lemmon delivers a vivid, street-by-bombed-out-street account of the final days of the battle for Kobani. Strewn throughout are reports of what the soldiers were up against: appalling ISIS acts like beheadings, torture and worse. The YPJ was outnumbered and underequipped, but they were fearless.

The battles for Kobani, and later Raqqa, were key moments in a history that is still being made. With international interest waning and ISIS sleeper cells and foreign fighter recruitments quietly continuing, ready to reignite the landscape, those Kurdish and Arab victories in 2017 and onward hold no guarantees. As Lemmon observes, it is “easier to kill a terrorist than to slay an ideology.” Still, no matter the final outcome, the women who fought this war have shown the world what courage and justice look like. And if the next generation must keep fighting, these warriors have shown them how.

The story of how young Kurdish women brought down terrorists from the Islamic State group finally gets told in The Daughters of Kobani.
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“Con men” is a familiar term for slick, slippery dudes who are out to relieve their victims of money—often taking honor, dignity and a prosperous future along with it. Now meet Tori Telfer’s Confident Women: Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Feminine Persuasion. These ladies lured people with their reassuring self-confidence and then, post-swindle, left their victims’ own confidence forever shattered. Tricked. Deceived. Cast aside with picked pockets and broken hearts. It’s awful stuff, but with Telfer at the wheel, reading these tales of plunder—littered with diamonds, fancy cars, mansions, booze and furs—is a fun, spicy romp.

Take Cassie Chadwick, a 19th-century counterfeiter and fortuneteller who proves “that the most ordinary woman could become someone truly memorable if they just bluffed hard enough.” Among other things, she claimed to be Andrew Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter (unbeknownst to him), swindling bankers out of a fortune before finally getting caught. Though she died in prison, perhaps she could rest in peace knowing that female scammers had become known as “Cassies.”


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Tori Telfer reflects on the fine line between herself and the dazzling con artists she profiles in Confident Women.


Then there’s Tania Head. A member of what Telfer calls “the tragediennes,” Head claimed to be a survivor of the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City. She described her ordeal in such excruciating detail that she became a hero, a “World Trade Center superstar” and the “undisputed queen of the survivors.” But was she even there that day?

Anastasia Romanovs abounded in the 20th century, each claiming to be the youngest child of Nicholas II, Russia’s last czar. Among them were Franziska and Eugenia, whose accents didn’t sound quite right but who were believed and supported anyway—until “DNA, that great equalizer, eventually came for both.”

As Telfer stuffs the stories of these grifters, drifters, spiritualists and fabulists in mesmerizing detail, she more than succeeds in giving them their due. But, she warns, make no mistake about the damage they left in their wake. Confident Women is also a dark cautionary tale about the fragile nature of trust and why we choose to believe.

With Tori Telfer at the wheel, reading these tales of plunder—littered with diamonds, fancy cars, mansions, booze and furs—is a fun, spicy romp.
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Native Americans have had an image problem for as long as non-­Native people have had a say in it, from the Pilgrims to P.T. Barnum to Andrew Jackson to Hollywood movie producers. In the media, Indigenous people have been cast as savage, ignorant and unfunny, except as the butt of jokes. There is a sad logic to that: What would Native Americans have to laugh about? White settlers tried to vanquish them, denied them their culture, language and tribal lands, portrayed them as caricatures of their authentic selves and trapped them by systemic racism that fosters roadblocks to work and education. As the groundbreaking stand-up comedian Charlie Hill once said to a white audience, “For so long you probably thought that Indians never had a sense of humor. We never thought you were too funny either.”

Richly researched and told through the vibrant voices of the comics themselves—including Cherokee citizen Will Rogers and his son Will Rogers Jr., Osage member Ryan Red Corn, Kiowa member Adrianne Chalepah, Oneida member Charlie Hill and more—Kliph Nesteroff’s extraordinary We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy chronicles a legacy deserving of inclusion in the history of comedy in the U.S. and Canada. Supporting players include Olympian, actor and member of the Sac and Fox Nation Jim Thorpe, who protested stereotyping in Hollywood Westerns in the 1930s and ’40s, demanding “only American Indians for American Indian parts.” Thorpe’s list of acceptable Native American performers, however, inspired the U.S. government to investigate whether those listed were truly Indigenous or if they were immigrants who were in the country illegally, according to Variety: “Italians, Mexicans, Armenians, and other swarthy-skinned foreigners have been passing themselves off as Indians, figuring no one could then question their entry.”

With the arrival of television, Native comedians-­to-be, inspired by shows like “The Tonight Show,” began learning their craft at far-flung casinos and truck stops in the middle of the night. Pay was pathetic, and audiences were sparse and unsure of how to react to a funny Native American, though fellow Indigenous people had no trouble relating to their own. In the 1970s, Charlie Hill, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Robin Williams shared the sidewalk line for a spot on the stage of the Comedy Store, a famous comedy club in Hollywood where scouts would come to spot new talent who, in turn, would help other aspiring comics—as Letterman did when he invited Hill onto his show as his first Native American guest.

Richly researched and told through the vibrant voices of Native American comics, Kliph Nesteroff’s extraordinary We Had a Little Real Estate Problem chronicles a legacy deserving of inclusion in the history of comedy.

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After almost ruining his voice while trying to add vocal gusto to an improvised rock band, John Colapinto—an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker and bestseller author—discovered how much he didn't know about the voice. In This Is the Voice, he diligently delivers his newfound knowledge and hard-earned perspective, aided by an exhaustive lineup of scholars, scientists, historians, physicians and voice artists. From Cicero to rock stars to demagogues to opera divas to newborns, Colapinto learns, enlightens and entertains.

Humans begin to learn language even before birth, absorbing their mothers’ words from within the womb. Our ability to use the voice in speech secures our spot at the top of the food chain and separates us from our closest cousin, the chimp, only by the lower placement of the human larynx. Our voices gives life and meaning to our words—and as humans, Colapinto says, we do crave meaning. Differences in prosody, timbre, tone and pitch further color our communications.

To understand all this, Colapinto first examines the physiology and anatomy involved in speaking—how the vocal cords, tongue and lips work together with our lungs and brain to produce sounds. Things take a darker turn when he recounts how Hitler, along with other incendiaries, learned to use his voice to incite his followers to violence. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Barack Obama are here, too, their voices technically explained and offered as examples of how oratory can inspire.

This is an intensely researched compilation that includes evolution, history, politics and competing scientific theories, launched by Colapinto’s personal struggle to save his voice. Fact-heavy yet digestible, This Is the Voice requires time and attention to absorb, but it’s worth it. In the end, Colapinto's book becomes its own clarion call, asking that we listen to each other, despite our different accents and their dividing origins, and that we use the power generated by our brains, lungs and vocal cords to understand and respect the effects our voices have on each other.

In This Is the Voice, John Colapinto delivers exhaustive knowledge about the human voice, aided by a lineup of scholars, scientists, historians, physicians and voice artists.
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In the spring of 2015, at the still-vigorous age of 87, Hans Lichtenstein agreed to a road trip. Accompanied by his son Jonathan, he would travel by car, ferry and train from Wales to Berlin, Germany, where, in 1939, Hans’ mother put him on a train to England to escape the Nazis. At 12 years old, Hans was one of 10,000 mostly Jewish children who escaped through what came to be known as the Kindertransport, fleeing the tragic ending that many of their families could not avoid. In Hans’ son’s eloquent and poignant memoir, The Berlin Shadow, ghosts from that time in history continue to haunt them both.

This reverse journey loomed ominously for the author. Often at odds with his “difficult” father, Jonathan, by then a father himself, as well as a professor and acclaimed playwright, feared that “such a trip could break the small amount of fondness that had only recently arisen between us.” The people and places that haunted Hans were as yet unknown to his son. He knew Hans hated Volkswagens and would not tolerate hearing Hitler’s name. Visits with relatives were rare and mysterious. Yet as Hans’ health grew more problematic, they understood he was running out of time to find some peace—or at least relief from his nightmares.

Jonathan’s own memories of his father’s erratic, dangerous behaviors—such as speeding them all in the family car toward the edge of a seaside cliff—left little room for bonding. When Hans, a physician beloved by his community, discounted his own children’s illnesses, he came close to causing their deaths. Jonathan paints vivid pictures of it all, interspersing their troubled past in Wales with their present in history-haunted Berlin. He writes in such vibrant detail that his words become like a map of the city, containing everything from streets to shops to family gravesites. Revelations ignite the landscape as father and son draw closer.

“It’s not just what you remember, it’s how you remember,” the author commented on an episode of the “History Extra” podcast. The Berlin Shadow casts a truly memorable light on both.

In 1939, Hans Lichtenstein’s mother put him on a train from Berlin to England. In 2015, he and his son Jonathan returned to Berlin in search of peace.
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“Divorce, divorce, divorce.” Homeira Qaderi’s phone screen lit up with these words from her husband, ending their arranged marriage—and her parental rights to their baby son. This heartbreaking act comes not at the beginning of her searing memoir, Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s Letter to Her Son, but near its inevitable conclusion, as a woman who could not conform to the strictures of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan must face the bitter consequences. Her journey from rebellious child to courageous teacher, acclaimed storyteller and, finally, despairing mother feels like a secret that needed to be told. Someday, Qaderi writes to her son, Siawash, from her chosen exile in California, she hopes their story will mean other Afghan mothers will not meet the same fate.

Qaderi’s childhood in Herat, occupied by Russians and later ruled by the Taliban, was fraught with violence. Bullets flew everywhere. Soldiers strode through streets and into homes. Books were forbidden for girls, and her mother “was like a spider trying to safeguard me within her web.” Her grandmother chastised her curiosity and fearlessness, but her father encouraged her. She was still a teenager when she began teaching boys and girls together, a forbidden act. Their classroom was a stifling tent that served as a mosque, and they kept their notebooks hidden in their Qurans lest Taliban soldiers found them learning instead of praying. Risking discovery and death for a few moments of youthful joy, Qaderi once even allowed dancing.

Interspersed among grim descriptions of Taliban rule and Qaderi’s heartbroken letters to her lost son are stunning passages describing the austere beauty of her homeland, which she still mourns. Yet her grief begs an even harder question: What does it take for a parent to choose hope for a greater good over their own child?

“Divorce, divorce, divorce.” Homeira Qaderi’s phone screen lit up with these words from her husband, ending their arranged marriage—and her parental rights to their baby son. This heartbreaking act comes not at the beginning of her searing memoir, Dancing in the Mosque: An Afghan Mother’s…

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In these unprecedented days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we may find our housebound selves more curious than ever about what’s going on outdoors in our neighborhoods and across our cities and towns. Where does electricity come from? What happens to our trash and recyclables when they leave our curb? How is our water cleaned? Consider the road signs, and think about what is in and on those roads. Ponder the manholes, their purpose and shape. Observe the ubiquitous squirrels and their mating habits. A Walk Around the Block: Stoplight Secrets, Mischievous Squirrels, Manhole Mysteries & Other Stuff You See Every Day (and Know Nothing About) reads like a very fun trot, with chapters that flow and entertain. Spike Carlsen’s relentless curiosity about everything leads us on to learn more—and more, and more.

Straying far from his block in Stillwater, Minnesota, this editor, author, carpenter and woodworker (he’s also the author of A Splintered History of Wood) tours the graffiti-adorned alleys and sewers (yes, you can) of Paris and a trash museum in New York. Closer to home, there’s a local water treatment plant, recycling operation, traffic control center and post office. There’s also the Mail Recovery Center, which consolidates 90 million undeliverable and nonreturnable mail items annually. Carlsen introduces a snow plower, mail sorter and deliverer, graffiti artist and pigeon professional. The makings of asphalt and concrete are explored, the shapes of road signs are explained, and the history of front porches is revealed. Ever wonder about roadkill? Street names? Roundabouts versus traffic lights? It’s all here. Statistics and cultural histories boost the facts, but the anecdotes carry the day. The people Carlsen meets along the way—the ones who have likely never crossed our minds—become unforgettable.

A Walk Around the Block succeeds in making the mundane fascinating, opening our minds (and front doors) to an everyday world easily taken for granted. As Carlsen writes, “I’ve learned knowledge is power; and when you know more about how the world works, you make better decisions as you walk through it.”

In these unprecedented days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we may find our housebound selves more curious than ever about what’s going on outdoors in our neighborhoods and across our cities and towns. Where does electricity come from? What happens to our trash and recyclables when…

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Much is known about the Yalta Conference of February 1945 and the “big three” (Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin) who met to decide on a fair distribution of power as World War II teetered toward an end in Europe. Churchill, Roosevelt and American ambassador W. Averell Harriman also brought their adult daughters, Sarah, Anna and Kathleen, respectively. Their fathers needed their help with matters big and small, from Kathy’s Russian language skills, to Sarah’s astute observations, to Anna’s daily efforts to protect Roosevelt’s rapidly failing health. The “little three,” as they became known, wrote letters to family and friends about their time at the edge of the Black Sea, and Catherine Grace Katz draws from them to great effect. The Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War is a splendid, colorful tapestry of details, as witnessed by three smart young women making the most of their extraordinary moment in history.

For Churchill, the sovereignty of Poland was a promise he intended to keep. For Stalin, retribution for his country’s crippling losses was critical. Roosevelt needed Soviet help in the Pacific as the war with Japan waged on, but his hope for a United Nations mattered even more. Together, these men would set the world’s balance of power for decades to come, for better or worse.

For the women, excluded from the daily discussions and monitored closely by Soviet security guards, there was much to observe on their own, including caviar- and vodka-infused meals, the vagaries of Russian hospitality and the conference delegates’ quirks. Kathy, a journalist, was a seasoned diplomat in her own right, having joined her father at his posts in London and Moscow. The U.S. president had grown to depend on Anna, who kept his secrets so well that few knew how ill he was. Sarah was allowed to leave her post with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in Britain to accompany the prime minister. For each, it was a lifetime’s dream come true.

Through their sharp eyes and Katz’s talented retelling, the Nazi and Soviet ravages of the Crimean countryside become a vivid backdrop to the Allies’ hope for lasting peace. Yalta would become synonymous with diplomacy that dangerously disappointed, opening the door to Soviet expansion and revealing its ruthless power. Yet, in a more positive light, it may also have presaged women’s contributions to international diplomacy.

Much is known about the Yalta Conference of February 1945 and the “big three” (Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin) who met to decide on a fair distribution of power as World War II teetered toward an end in Europe. Churchill, Roosevelt and…

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“His story. My story. . . . It’s our story,” writes David A. Robertson about his father, Don. And so it is in Black Water: Family, Legacy, and Blood Memory, a family history embedded in a memoir that shimmers with love and pain.

As a child born in 1935, Don didn’t have official Indigenous status, despite his heritage. He spent nine months of the year camping with his family on their trapline in the far north of Manitoba, Canada. Then the Family Allowances Act of 1945 changed their way of life. The act provided financial support for every child with a permanent address, so Don’s family was forced to give up their trapline, except for brief spring runs. Don went to a public school, where he had to abandon his native language, Swampy Cree. He later devoted his educational career to ensuring that Indigenous people’s languages and culture were respected and preserved, earning the government’s support as he established programs across Canada. Black Water begins and ends with the story of the Black Water traplines that meant sustenance, survival and community for generations of Swampy Cree.

Yet Don and his European Canadian wife decided not to tell their three children that they were “First Nations kids,” believing that knowledge of their Swampy Cree roots would be a burden for them. This decision left their son David feeling like a puzzle with a missing piece. As a teenager with dark skin, Robertson grew up far from a trapline, in a mostly white neighborhood in Winnipeg, Manitoba, denying he was “Indian” and laughing along with racist jokes. When his parents separated, he spent 10 years without his father, except for weekends and golf games. Hurt, angry and increasingly anxious about everything, Robertson eventually confronted and reconciled with Don. With that came the revelation of his Cree heritage. Many journeys to Norway House along Lake Winnipeg followed, revealing his family’s roots, his “blood memory” and stories to be passed down to his own children.

Claiming one’s heritage, learning where “home” truly is, is an oft-told tale, but Robertson infuses his story with a wisdom that binds his own discoveries to the common experience of sharing family legacies with future generations. Memory is a gift we owe our children, he says. Listen to your own storytellers and hold them close while you can.

Robertson binds his personal story of learning about his Cree ancestry with to the common experience of sharing family legacies with future generations.
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Drilling down into the second-largest school district in the country to shine an intimate light on a few senior boys in two very different high schools would have been a daunting task in less capable hands. In Show Them You’re Good: A Portrait of Boys in the City of Angels the Year Before College, Jeff Hobbs does it so well that these soon-to-be men may be forever cast in the amber of their adolescence: slightly familiar from the start and, finally, utterly unforgettable. 

Ánimo Pat Brown (APB), one of six Green Dot charter schools created to remedy “poor and falling graduation statistics” in the Los Angeles Unified School District, is known for its high graduation and college matriculation rates. For its students, many from immigrant families struggling to gain footholds in this country, APB is the rare path to opportunity.

Beverly Hills High School (BHHS) is rated in the top 10% of California schools, holding forth in a city that was founded as a whites-only covenant. Famous alumni include Betty White and Guns N’ Roses’ Slash. Its swim gym, where the floor opens to reveal a swimming pool, made a memorable appearance in the classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life

From these two schools, “separated by much more than the twenty-two miles of city pavement between them,” come the stories of Carlos, Tio, Luis and Byron at APB, and Owen, Sam, Harrison, Bennett and Jonah at BHHS. These young men have different backgrounds and aspirations, but they’re all enveloped in the fog of the American higher education application process. 

Following them through their senior year, Hobbs is allowed an unflinching look at the supporting players in their lives, from Sam’s strict mom and Tio’s troubled father to Carlos’ brother at Yale and Owen’s bedridden mother. Harrison is obsessed with finding a Division I school where he can play football, despite the BHHS team’s perennial losing streak. Byron tells his Cornell interviewer that his goal is to be Iron Man. 

How they each arrived at this pivotal point in their lives may not predict what happens next, but it is our privilege, thanks to Hobbs, to follow them. Readers will come to care deeply about these students’ journeys.

Drilling down into the second-largest school district in the country to shine an intimate light on a few senior boys in two very different high schools would have been a daunting task in less capable hands. In Show Them You’re Good: A Portrait of Boys…

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Like the sequoias of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, red and yellow cedars in Taiwan are so huge that just two of them, writes environmental historian Jessica J. Lee, can look and feel like a whole forest. She finds them as she hikes through the mountainous spine of the country where her beloved grandfather Gong was sent home to die, alone in the dementia of Alzheimer’s. Lee still grieves his solitary death and is determined to learn more about his life from before he and Po, her “irascible, difficult grandmother,” became Canadian immigrants. In Taiwan, where Lee is both stranger and descendant, her compass is a barely decipherable letter left behind by Gong, written as his mind disintegrated. Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family’s Past Among Taiwan’s Mountains and Coasts charts her ardent quest to discover and reconcile her family’s past with her need to claim an ancestral home.

Her journey is a challenge. Taiwan’s language is almost as foreign to Lee as its landscape—volcanic fumaroles, towering peaks enveloped in fog and the constant threat of mudslides and earthquakes. Lee studies the calligraphy of both Taiwanese and Chinese (her mother speaks Mandarin) and sprinkles her memoir with the illustrations that help her find her way through the two languages. Still, as she visits her mother’s crowded childhood home city of Taipei, Lee’s biracial features and diffident tongue reveal her as a foreigner. 

Taiwan has a complicated history, explored and exploited by Europeans and tossed back and forth between Japan and China. Lee learns that Gong was a fighter pilot with the famous Flying Tigers, risking his life on secret missions and rewarded for his bravery. Injured in a 1969 crash that should have killed him, he could no longer fly and left Taiwan for the promise of flying in Canada, only to become a factory janitor instead. 

Lee finds her own ways of imprinting her rediscovered homeland on her spirit. Using her skills as a scholar, she identifies the many species she finds as she hikes and bikes through the countryside, some existing nowhere else in the world. As Taiwan reveals itself, Lee comes to a kind of peace. Gong’s past and her present, so evocatively examined, suggest the forest she needed to find.

Like the sequoias of the U.S. Pacific Northwest, red and yellow cedars in Taiwan are so huge that just two of them, writes environmental historian Jessica J. Lee, can look and feel like a whole forest. She finds them as she hikes through the mountainous…

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Lovers of our national parks and monuments may be familiar with President Theodore Roosevelt’s speech at the Grand Canyon in 1903: “Leave it as it is,” he implored the crowd, then went to work on saving 230 million acres for what became known as “America’s best idea.” Now, as these public lands come increasingly under siege by private interests abetted by lobbyists and politicians, essayist, nature writer and environmental activist David Gessner asks what those words meant then and if they matter now. On a quest to understand Teddy Roosevelt and his passions, Leave It as It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness digs deep into a cultural and political history as complex as Roosevelt himself. Insightful, observant and wry, writing with his heart on his well-traveled sleeve and a laser focus on the stunning beauty of the parks, Gessner shares an epic road trip through these storied lands. 

With his newly college-graduated nephew riding shotgun, Gessner begins where Roosevelt’s love affair with the West first took hold, in the South Dakota Badlands. Riven with grief after his wife and mother died on the same day late in the 19th century, the future president left behind his young daughter and searched for solace as a rancher amid the wildlife and wilderness. And while these 21st-century campers find that much has changed—Gessner bemoans the “Disneyfication” of such areas—they celebrate the fact that bison surround (and thoroughly blemish) their car as the animals wander by their campsite. It was Roosevelt, after all, who saved this iconic beast from extinction.

Weaving an often candidly critical biography of the 26th president through this account of the parks he created, Gessner eventually arrives at Bears Ears in southeastern Utah. After conferring with the Native American tribes for whom these lands are ancestral and sacred, President Barack Obama proclaimed it a national monument as he left office in 2016. In 2017, President Donald Trump promptly shrank the area by 85%, essentially inviting commercial interests to encroach. 

Today, “leave it as it is” may no longer be possible for the parks. Can they still be saved from corrupting human interests? Roosevelt, Gessner insists, would know what to do.

Lovers of our national parks and monuments may be familiar with President Theodore Roosevelt’s speech at the Grand Canyon in 1903: “Leave it as it is,” he implored the crowd, then went to work on saving 230 million acres for what became known as “America’s…

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