ON THE
Bookshelf
Preserving the Alaskan Frontier When Secretary of State William H. Seward pushed for the purchase of Alaska in 1867, the acquisition was quickly dubbed “Seward’s Folly.” That began to change 30 years later with the Klondike gold strike, and ever since, Alaska has held a place in the American imagination. Some saw strategic value, others saw abundant economic resources, while still others thought of Alaska as the nation’s last unspoiled wilderness and fought to preserve it. The struggle over what to do with Alaska’s more than half-million square miles of rugged, sparsely populated territory has not abated, and now, in “The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom, 1879–1960” (HarperCollins, 2011), Douglas Brinkley recounts the efforts of environmentalists and the federal government to contain the excesses of the fur, timber, coal, fishing and oil industries in the territory, which became the 49th state in 1959. Brinkley, a professor of history and a fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, delivers a narrative filled with an assortment of historical figures who played a role in Alaska’s development, including John Muir, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, William O. Douglas, Walt Disney and Dwight D. Eisenhower. To write the book, Brinkley mined a dozen archival sites, including the Library of Congress, Harvard University, University of California at Berkeley and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service National Conservation Training Center in Shepherdstown, W.Va. To get better acquainted with wild Alaska, he
“Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum,” by Marcia Brennan, associate professor of art history at Rice (MIT Press, 2010)
“The Other Emerson,” edited by Cary Wolfe, the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice, and Branka Arsic (University of Minnesota Press, 2010)
even camped in the Arctic, sailed the Aleutians and hiked the Denali wilderness while spending months living in the state. A prolific writer, Brinkley has written biographies of Dean Acheson, James Forrestal, Jimmy Carter and Henry Ford, as well as the best-selling histories “The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day, and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion,” “Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War” and “Parish Priest: Father McGivney and American Catholicism.” His book, “The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” won the prestigious 2007 Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and he edited “The Reagan Diaries,” released in 2007. And last year’s “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America” chronicles how the 26th president transformed his interest in the outdoors into edicts that preserved such sites as the Grand Canyon, Devil’s Tower and the Petrified Forest. —Franz Brotzen
“Surfer Girls in the New World Order,” by Krista Comer, associate professor of English at Rice (Duke University Press, 2010)
“The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914–1922,” by Annemarie H. Sammartino ’96 (Cornell University Press, 2010)
“The Spirit Lens: A Novel of the Collegia Magica,” by Carol Neilon Berg ’70 (Roc Books, 2010)
Rice Magazine
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No. 10
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2011
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