Description
Winner of the inaugural Theodore Roosevelt Association Book Prize
A captivating account of how Theodore Roosevelt’s lifelong passion for the flora and fauna set the stage for The usa’s flora and fauna conservation movement and made up our minds his legacy as a founding father of today’s museum naturalism.
No U.S. president is more popularly associated with nature and flora and fauna than is Theodore Roosevelt—prodigious hunter, tireless adventurer, and ardent conservationist. We bring to mind him as a larger-than-life original, yet in The Naturalist, Darrin Lunde has firmly situated Roosevelt’s indomitable curiosity about the flora and fauna in the tradition of museum naturalism.
As a child, Roosevelt actively modeled himself on the men (including John James Audubon and Spencer F. Baird) who pioneered this key branch of biology by developing a taxonomy of the flora and fauna—basing their work on the experiential study of nature. The affect that these scientists and their trailblazing methods had on Roosevelt shaped not only his audacious personality but his entire career, informing his work as a statesman and in the end affecting generations of Americans’ relationship to this country’s wilderness.
Drawing on Roosevelt’s diaries and shuttle journals in addition to Lunde’s own role as a leading figure in museum naturalism today, The Naturalist reads Roosevelt through the lens of his love for nature. From his teenage collections of birds and small mammals to his time at Harvard and political rise, Roosevelt’s fascination with flora and fauna and exploration culminated in his triumphant expedition to Africa, a travel which he himself regarded as to be the apex of his varied life.
With narrative verve, Lunde brings his singular experience to bear on our twenty-sixth president’s life and constructs a perceptively researched and insightful history that tracks Roosevelt’s maturation from exuberant boyhood hunter to vital champion of serious scientific inquiry.