OUTDOORS PORTRAIT White-tailed Jackrabbit

evelt’s love of hunting and wilderness. Many Americans continue to grapple with the seeming paradox of a hunter who loves wildlife. Roosevelt killed thousands of animals in his lifetime. Yet he helped protect and conserve lands that sustain millions of wild creatures in perpetuity. Wilson’s book, which won a gold medal for biography from the Independent Book Publishers Association, captures Roosevelt’s joy of life and concern for the world while documenting a lifetime of hunting across the United States and his famous safari in Africa.

Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild

Michael Forsberg. The University of Chicago Press, 256 pp. $45 Draw a line from Shelby to Great Falls to Billings. All of Montana to the east—nearly two-thirds of the state—is part of the Northern Great Plains ecosystem.

Interestingly, most Montana tourism promotions and coffeetable books depict the state as a series of sparkling trout rivers flanked by snowcapped peaks. The fact that far more of Montana is in the Great Plains than the Rocky Mountains makes Great Plains important reading and viewing for those wanting to fully understand the Treasure State.

Michael Forsberg, a Nebraska photographer published regularly in National Geographic, loves the prairie’s minimalist landscape. His book is filled with lyrical images of a mostly horizontal environment, where people, wildlife, and landscapes are shaped by wind and weather. Adding to the reader’s understanding of the vast region are thought ful essays by geographer David Wishart, poet Ted Kooser,

and writer-rancher Dan O’Brien.

How Sportsmen Saved the World: The Unsung Conservation Efforts of Hunters and Anglers

E. Donnall Thomas Jr. Lyons Press, 240 pp. $24.95 You may not know it from reading books and magazines produced on the East and West coasts, but the modern environmental and conservation movements grew—and continue to prosper—from work by hunters and anglers to protect wild places. In How Sportsmen Saved the World, Lewistown physician, part-time Alaskan hunting guide, and acclaimed outdoors writer E. Donnall Thomas Jr. details the history of the American conservation movement. He begins with how market hunting nearly wiped out many North Am erican big game populations. He then documents efforts by early hunter-conservationists such as George Bird Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt to pass legislation to protect land and regulate hunting. Thomas also devotes much attention to lifelong hunter Aldo Leopold, who popularized the concept of ecology, helped establish The Wild erness Society and The Wildlife Soci ety, and created in A Sand County Almanac compelling and en during arguments for conserving land, water, and wildness.

Thomas ends by summarizing how hunters continue to anchor wildlife conservation through what wildlife biologists are now calling the North American Wild life Con servation Model. The North American model is based on seven principles, such as maintaining wildlife as a public resource, allowing all citizens an equal right to hunt, and conserving wildlife according to both scientific principles and democratic principles of law. Writes Thomas, “As applied in the United States and Canada, [these seven principles] have given us healthy, free-ranging, unfettered populations of wildlife un equaled anywhere else in the world.”

Wild Horses of the World

Moira C. Harris. Octopus Books, 176 pp. $24.99 This captivating natural history book includes chapters on the Am erican mustang, Au stralian brumby, Mon golia Przewaslksi horse, and the ponies of Europe