This spectacular full-color pictorial is the companion volume to Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan's much-anticipated 12-hour PBS documentary. In the book, as in the TV show, Duncan and Burns track "America's best idea" from its first inklings to the 1871 creation of Yellowstone, the world's first national park, to the truly wondrous proliferation of these natural sites to a total of 84 million acres.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review.
Duncan and Burns, who last teamed on Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip, rejoin in this visually stunning guide to the unforgettable landscapes and fascinating history of America's national parks. A companion to the documentary miniseries, this book provides not only an armchair tour of the parks but lessons in American history and biography, as Duncan and Burns attempt to answer the question, "Who are we?" through the foundation and legacy of American conservation. From Yellowstone, the first national park, to Acadia to the Everglades, readers will learn the origins of many of the parks, monuments, and historic areas across the U.S., illustrated with more than a century's worth of photographs. A recurring theme throughout history has been the value and purpose of conservation and beauty, versus utility and tourism, and the story of the parks brings it into brilliant focus; readers will meet characters like John Muir, Horace Albright, Stephen Mather, Adolph Murie, and others who helped create the existing park system (with no shortage of attention paid to Theodore Roosevelt). Likely to inspire adventure-seekers of all generations, this broad, deep, evocative survey is just the kind of volume readers have come to expect from filmmaker and cultural historian Burns.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From the Publisher
Praise for the PBS series:
“Stunning and restorative, like the parks themselves.” —The New York Times
“A masterful historic document, a vivid portrait of the land set against the stories of those who worked to acquire it and then protect it against those who still would dismantle or compromise it.” —New York Daily News
“Beautiful and erudite...Underneath its wonder, The National Parks is really about how Americans learned (or failed to learn) proper stewardship of nature.” —The Washington Post
Library Journal
08/01/2014
Based on Burns's film series, which traces the history of national parks in the United States. Different voices are used for longer quotations; despite the missing visuals, the production gets the job done admirably.
NOVEMBER 2009 - AudioFile
The PBS National Parks series was a marvelous production featuring spectacular pictures and a compelling story of the preservation of natural and historic places for the use of all Americans, irrespective of class or wealth. This abridgment of the companion book to the series reveals the political battles and personal stories associated with the development of the national park system. However, Ken Burns is a far better filmmaker than a narrator. His pace is too slow, and his tone overly dramatic, making the whole production clunky and dull. A supporting cast provides some of the longer quotations from letters and documents, and Dayton Duncan (the author of the companion book) gives an effective afterword, but, sadly, the production as a whole is disappointing. A.B. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
