OK everybody, pull out the Rand McNally and take a gander at that road map of Florida.
Damn — look at all those criss-crossing highways. Looks kind of like grandpa's white ankles, with those bulging veins. And those blotches of yellow down south and through the state's gut, from St. Pete all the way across to Daytona. What's up with that?
It sure the hell looks like urban blight to me.
But notice all those green spots… those parks and nature preserves. Wonder how those got there?
Wonder no more. You can thank the president. No, not that guy. Thank the guy who was president 100 years ago.
Theodore Roosevelt is one of the most fascinating people in our nation's history. Our youngest and most vigorous president, he was also a champion of conservation.
And some of the things he preserved were those green spaces in Florida. We have Roosevelt to thank for saving a lot of our state. Ocala National Forest… Pelican Island… We have so much of what we have because of this great man. It's true that this peninsula of paradise is ecologically endangered, but thanks to Roosevelt, some spaces remain pristine. Animals and birds are protected.
If you think of Roosevelt, you probably think of the glasses and teeth and remember he was from up North somewhere. New York, wasn't it? And didn't he lead that charge up San Juan Hill in the Spanish American War?
Correct! All of the above.
But now we know what an important role he played in the development of Florida. There's a new biography of Roosevelt — The Wilderness Warrior (Harper, $34.99) — that will become one of those essential books for people who love this state.
We owe this new look at Roosevelt to America's most successful and interesting historian, Douglas Brinkley. Lots of historians, from H.W. Brands to Edmund Morris, have written interesting books on Roosevelt. But Brinkley is brilliant in looking through the prism of nature to show Roosevelt as a fighter for the preservation of wild America.
Roosevelt is one of those people who becomes more fascinating the more you know about him. And what do you know about him? Did you know that he read a book a day every day of his adult life? Even while in the White House, he didn't break this reading regimen.
And he wrote, too. President Obama is not the only chief executive to be a First Author. Roosevelt wrote a lot about his birding and hunting expeditions and of his love for being in nature.
Roosevelt and his legacy could be in no better hands. Brinkley himself is a national treasure. He's that rare historian with the gifts of superb scholarship who writes books that the rest of us enjoy reading. He is a "popular historian" in the best sense of that term. In the inverse world of academia, the more popular your work, often the more derided you are, but The Wilderness Warrior should satisfy both academic and general audiences. History (the H-word to a lot of folks) gets a bad rap. I was a history major and I teach history courses every semester. Students come into the class with loathing in their hearts. It's because history has been taught merely as a recitation of dates and names.
In the hands of a gifted historian and writer like Brinkley, however, we come alive in the world of a century ago, and walk through the woods with this fascinating and gifted man who happens to be president of the United States.
Brinkley spent a good deal of time here researching the book, and one wonders how he manages to get 35 hours into his day. He has been tremendously prolific and isn't one of those drudges who mines the same territory over and over. His interests are all over the map.
Consider:
He's literary executor of the Hunter S. Thompson estate and has edited two essential books in the Gonzo canon: The Proud Highway (Villard, $29.95) and Fear and Loathing in America (Simon and Schuster, $30). He's at work finishing The Mutineer, the third volume of Thompson's letters. These books contain some of Thompson's finest writing… and the work might never have seen the light of day if Brinkley hadn't recognized Thompson's gift for correspondence.
Brinkley's most recent best-seller was The Reagan Diaries (Harper Collins, $35), which he edited at the behest of the president's widow. This shows that Brinkley achieved hell-of-a-guy status with both the Thompson and Reagan camps. Could you ever imagine those two crowds agreeing on anything?
The Great Deluge (William Morrow, $27.95) was a massive history of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, in the hands of readers before the first anniversary of the disastrous storm. Brinkley was living in New Orleans when the storm hit and this book was truly heartfelt history.
The Majic Bus (Harcourt, $24.95) is the story of Professor Brinkley's cross-country trip with students as a way of teaching students history in the places where it happened. It was a genius idea and it makes for a damn-wish-I-was-on-this-trip sort of book. And yeah, it's "majic," not "magic."
He's written a slew of other fine books on Jimmy Carter, Rosa Parks, the priest who founded the Knights of Columbus, Jack Kerouac, John Kerry and others. This dude is America's historian and to prove it, his next book, Witness to America (Harper, $29.99), covers our story from the Revolutionary War to the present. That ought to be issued to every citizen.
For now, get hold of The Wilderness Warrior and fall under the spell of one of our greatest presidents and one of our finest storytellers.
This article appears in Feb 24 – Mar 2, 2010.