Park University Books

Edmund Kirby Smith remains one of the most neglected of the important figures of the Civil War era. Best known for his command of the Trans-Mississippi Department from 1863 until the close of the war, Kirby Smith found himself acting with military, civil and economic authority after the Union essentially divided the Confederacy in two. He was an important figure and yet his tale is perhaps better told in studies of his administration rather than in a biography.

Joseph Parks gives a solid if not particularly compelling account of Kirby Smith's career. Kirby Smith, a Floridian, served under Joseph Johnston at the First Battle of Bull Run and was seriously wounded. After recovering from the wound, Kirby Smith commanded Confederate forces in East Tennessee and showed some tactical ability in the invasion of Kentucky which culminated in the battle of Perryville. During that campaign, Kirby Smith feuded with Braxton Bragg who commanded the main wing of the Confederate invasion. Kirby Smith would later command the Trans Mississippi region and, while there were some successes such as the Red River campaign, all in all Kirby Smith was content on the defensive, much in the style of his mentor Johnston. Parks offers little on Kirby Smith's post war career which is fairly odd since Kirby Smith taught at the University of the South, an institution that Parks was affiliated with.

This is all well and good. However, the chief problem with the book is Parks' lack of interest in Kirby Smith's roles in politics and economics. Kirby Smith's role in the Confederacy was not simply that of a general. He was the highest ranking Confederate offical west of the river and was isolated after the fall of Vicksburg in 1863. For almost two years, Kirby Smith dealt with economic problems (such as trade), morale problems as Southerners lost hope in the cause, Indian raids, the continuing struggles of the French in Mexico and political problems, as the Confederate government and the states clashed. Parks does not offer much in the way of insight to these problems that vexed Kirby Smith and prefers to focus more on military matters. Kirby Smith simply did not have that many chances on the battle field and the spheres he occupied were very different than most other Confederate commanders.

Furthermore, Parks seems a bit too willing to give his subject the benefit of the doubt at all times such as his feud with Bragg. While this was not particularly odd (Bragg quarreled with a host of Confederate commanders), Kirby Smith simply can not be as blameless as Parks portrays him. Richard Taylor, for one, would also have severe problems with Kirby Smith later on in the war during the Trans Mississippi command. At the same time, the view espoused by the late Thomas Connelly of Kirby Smith as a young man deluded by a messianic complex seems equally flawed as well.

For basic information on Kirby Smith, take a look at Parks though be warned the book is very dated. For the importance of Kirby Smith and his role in the greater story of the Confederacy, take a look at Robert Kerby's study "Kirby Smith's Confederacy." While not offering much in the way of biographical information, Kerby's book seems a bit nearer the mark in capturing Kirby Smith than either Parks or Connelly did, showing a young man with some talents overwhelmed by a task that was simply beyond his, or anyone else's, abilities. For Smith's feud with Taylor, Jeffery Prushankin's "Crisis in Command" is solid.

As for Parks, while he does give some of the basics of Kirby Smith's life, he really fails to capture just how important his subject was in the story of the Confederacy. If Kirby Smith is ever going to rise out of obscurity, it will not be on his military record but on how an untrained military leader found himself trying to maintain some sense of order as he tried to hold together a collapsing economy, society and political system. It's an interesting tale and one that deserves to be told. Too bad Parks simply could not see the bigger picture.

The book "Guided with a Steady Hand" is recommended reading for those historians interested in the history of Mother Neff State Park, Texas. It provides input into the general role of the Civilian Conservation Corps in the "New Deal" era, but contains little relavent material for areas outside of Texas. This book makes for easy reading and is loaded with information about the Texas Parks and Wildlife Dept., and the daily life of one particular CCC camp. However, for those readers who have no interest in the history of state parks in Texas, this book is of little value.

A fine introduction to historic preservation as well as to the byzantine workings of the National Park Service. The early chapters (not including the first) are more interesting and less bogged down in nonessential detail. Toward the end, the author has a tendency to bury the reader in bureaucratic wranglings and the comings and goings of NPS personnel. Even so, the sections on the early interpretation of the site, the development of Franklin Court, and the epilogue--almost a summary--are well worth reading to anyone interested in historic preservation and interpretation.

This book examines several issues that affect national parks though their causes lie outside these parks. Though grounded in a larger literature about the dozens of external threats to national parks, Freemuth's book emphasizes only a particular kind of threat - - air pollution. He also limits himself to a single region, the desert southwest. These kinds of limitations are a good strategy for a dissertation, and this book began as a dissertation, but Freemuth would have been well advised to broaden the subject somewhat while working the thesis into book form.

The book documents several important issues in the 1980s concerning how pollution, whether nonpoint smog from Los Angeles or point pollution from the Navajo Power Plant, affect air quality, visibility, and the visitor experience in the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and other parks in the Colorado Plateau. Much more than other books on national parks, which tend to emphasize preservation over use, he emphasizes visitors. Pollution that doesn't bother visitors, he implies (but does not say), is much less worrying than pollution that does.

Freemuth does a good job documenting the politics around these cases, and for this reason the book is a good reference if you're interested in air quality issues in national parks. But the book has a weak overall argument and he doesn't effectively return to the larger external threats issue.

This book is a history of the Petrified Forest and how people have investigated it scientifically, and protected it as a National Monument and National Park. There is a VERY brief coverage of the Park area in Triassic times and how the trees came to be where they are, fairly detailed coverage of the history of the Monument and its interaction with the surrounding area and Route 66 up through World War II, and very condensed coverage of history from World War II onward. The Painted Desert region is mentioned only tangentially. If you're looking for a guidebook to the National Park, this isn't it. Other than historical background, there's no information useful for the visitor on the groun.

It is well-written, readable, and can be read in a couple of hours. Nice background for a visit to the park.

There is a point when theory becomes an almost purely aesthetic endeavor, where metaphors and the desire for intellectual proximity and intimacy with the absolute truth overrides comprehensibility as a central task of writing and communicating with the reader. The seductiveness of this endeavor not only enraptures the author, but many a sublime-seeking reader as well. This is not to say that theory has no place in historical writing, quite the contrary, without it, historical writing is no better than the drivel of trivia, but one has to wonder about the analytical worth of theory, when such dubious documents as the Tanaka Memorial form the "factual" foundation for Park's intellectual flying buttresses.

This book maintains that the National Park Service (NPS) has used inadequate science to reach the conclusion that mountain goats are not native to the Olympic Peninsula and therefore should be removed from Olympic National Park. The books is fully convincing on this point: NPS science would not survive an audit. This is not the only park where this is true - - indeed, the elk controversy in Yellowstone involves one of the same park biologists, Doug Houston.

Lyman seems unaware or unconcerned that almost no science would survive the kind of spotlight that he has trained on the NPS. This has been a recurring theme in the sociology of science, for example, and it lies behind the claims of many in that field that scientific truth claims are socially constructed and not "true" in the sense intended. Thus, one might make this part of a wider argument about science, but Lyman does not do this. Indeed, Lyman seems certain that the application of enough research effort generally yields a unique, widely-accepted and true conclusion. (One might challenge the validity of each of those adjectives, I might note.)

Instead of thinking about the use of science for policy problems, Lyman chooses to go at the NPS like a cross-examining attorney. The NPS maintains that the people who introduced mountain goats to the park in 1925 did so because they wanted to establish a new game animal in the park. Lyman insists there's no proof this is true. He's right, there isn't any smoking gun. But the likely groups involved are a hunting club and the US Forest Service, with possible involvement of the Biological Survey. Why else would these people introduce goats? Especially in 1925, before the issues of exotic animals and the health of ecosystems had become important to policy making? One can, like Lyman, demand ever better proof but at some point you have to present your own interpretation of the facts. Lyman does not do this.

As a result, this can be a frustrating book. Lyman has certainly been right to call the NPS on its sloppy science and its unwillingness to test its own hypotheses or to consider serious alternative hypotheses. That critique will sustain an article or two (which Lyman in fact published before this book). That critique alone won't sustain a book, unfortunately - - for a book, Lyman needs to develop an alternative story of his own. In other words, if he wants to criticize NPS claims that mountain goats did not live in the Olympics, a book is the right place to make the alternative claim that goats *did* live in the Olympics.

Lyman provides a sketch of what that alternative would look like, and it would probably mean that mountain goats became extinct during a warming period about 4000 years before the present. Demonstrating this would require finding goat remains at an archaeological site. Lyman recognizes all this. Unfortunately, and even annoyingly, he never commits to this alternative. Indeed, he often admits that the NPS position may well be correct, and concedes that it is even more likely to be correct than incorrect despite its shaky scientific foundations.

In that case: why get so worked up about this? Put this effort into a problem where the NPS uses shaky science and then show that the Service is actually wrong, not just maybe wrong.

Or better still: Lyman could have taken this story and moved to the broader policy questions. When science is uncertain, and it usually is, how do you make policy decisions? Should the burden of proof lie on the NPS? On anyone who proposes policy change (thus privileging the status quo)? Or should the burden of proof be imposed on outsiders who choose to challenge the "experts" of the NPS? There are no easy answers to those questions, and the mountain goat question would have provided an interesting vehicle with which to explore them. But, alas, that is not the book that Lyman chose to write.

A fine book of photos, many quite rich in color and amazing in content. Prose is geared toward the least knowledgeable person among us. Author again shows his love of the Panthera tigris and his devotion to their conservation. A nice book for hte coffee table.

The National Park Service (NPS) is mandated to preserve these parks for future generations as well as to manage them for the enjoyment of current generations. Sometimes there are trade-offs, and this book examines one: is Yellowstone managing its elk herd for the benefit of the ecosystem, to preserve the nature of the park for future generations, or to satisfy today's tourists with a picture of elk eating the lawn at Mammoth Hot Springs?

Hint: the elk are eating the lawn.

The NPS denies that anything is amiss, despite a long controversy in the literature over its policy of "natural regulation." Briefly put, the NPS maintains that there are not too many elk because they will be naturally limited by their food supply. Critics argue that, even if elk are eventually limited by their food supply, they will inflict serious damage on the ecosystem when they stabilize at a very high number.

In this book, Wagner provides a very thorough reassessment of the NPS position reflected in Douglas Houston's The Northern Yellowstone Elk: Ecology and Management (1982). Wagner acknowledges that elk population reached an equilibrium level, and that it seems to have been limited by its food supply. However, the equilibrium population was much larger than any of the advocates of natural regulation had expected, and it had much more serious ecological effects than advocates have been willing to admit.

Wagner convinced me - - but read both books and make up your own mind.

Unfortunately, Wagner is a hard book to read because it's written poorly. He does not organize material effectively. He leads with reevaluations of small points, builds to a larger conclusion in most chapters - - but some chapters don't really have a conclusion worthy of the name. Some chapters have introductions to the topic and controversy, others jump right in to the science. He really needed the strong hand of an editor here, someone who could force him to give the big picture first in each chapter, and then move to the scientific reasoning and evidence to back up that overall vision. It's a testament to the quality of the underlying science that this book persuades despite the poor presentation.

While the Natural History Section of this Book is fine, with modest detail on the plants and animals, the book goes down hill when it get to History and Land Use Issues. The author seems extremely vindictive against the Mountain Cattlemen of Victoria, perhap a reflection of her battles with them as a member of the Victoria National Parks Association. Her bias shows up in many ways, such as those that agree with her are "caring" or "enlightened", those against her are "uninformed" or "greedy." Then again it seems the only self interested parties in the land use conflicts, in her view, are the Cattlemen (especially) and the loggers, but never the Greens, which is baloney of the first order. In total the book could have done better by sticking to the natural history aspect and steering clear of controversy.