I was planning to get back to our genre, but I had stumbled on this narrow biography of Teddy, and decided to read it first. I found this on one of the end-of-the-year Amazon lists, this one for best histories in 2009. The most readable part was the Prologue in which the author described the people trying to escape from Wallace, Idaho and the forest fire of 1910. Under great duress and opposition coming from J.P. Morgan and the other robber barons of the era, TR established the National Forest Service. But, Congress underfunded the agency, so it did not have the manpower to do what it needed to do. TR’s inspirations in this were Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. The fire descriptions were amazing, but like many historians, Egan got into many petty details about who fought which part of the fire, where, etc. After the fire, he did a good job broadening his focus to put it all in perspective with the events since, and what the fire service is like today. Probably, this is a book you could skip, but I did learn a lot about the history of the fire service, and that was good. You could pick it up in a bookstore and read the Prologue.
West Coast Don
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