The National Parks: America's Best Idea [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This is a beautiful book! Mr. Duncan and Mr. Burns have done a wonderful job telling the history of our National Park system. The book clearly shows the depth of the 30-odd years that they have been working on their project. As the sub-title of the book indicates, this is "an illustrated history." The illustrations alone are worth the price of the book. You won't see the usual travel guide and brochure shots in this book. Instead you will find hundreds of historic and contemporary photos of the National Park system. I cannot imagine the amount of research that went into assembly and organizing all of these photos. They are simply gorgeous.

The text is very informative and provides you with a good history of the National Park system. You will learn a lot about the history of our nation when you read this book. Each chapter also has an interview with someone who is part of the Park Service or has close connections with the Service. These interviews (no surprise here) help bring to life that topics of the text. Being a Ken Burns project, the text tells the big story through little stories: history is personalized and seen through the eyes of the participants.

Simply put, this is a book to linger over and savor. It is a coffee table book in the truest sense: you will want to keep it within easy reach. This is a book to inspire you to daydream and ponder. It will enrich your experiences of our National Parks and you will find yourself planning years of vacations! If you have any interest in our National Park system, you must buy this book. You will not regret it for one second! Enjoy!

Let me first point out that I'm just reviewing the companion book to Ken Burns' PBS show--having not (yet!) seen the show I make no attempt at discussing how it relates to the TV program. This is simply a look on how the book holds up on its own merits.

And let me say it is an eye-popper! As a coffee table book alone, it succeeds wildly, with all kinds of stunning photos that make you want to grab the kids and hit the road. What is particularly enjoyable is that it uses a whole range of illustrations--besides glorious contemporary photos of these magnificent landscapes, there are fascinating historic photos in B&W and photos of the various cranks, caretakers and visionaries whose lives were so deeply entwined with the park. There are also a number of beautifully reproduced photos of paintings from the Hudson River school of painting back in the mid-1800s that not only sparked interest in America's landscapes but created one of the first great artistic movements in our country.

And as always, it's amazing how landscapes can communicate such profound, and profoundly human emotions, even when there are no people depicted. The simple visual of a lone tree, buried under a heavy canopy of snow and placed against a blank winter landscape can convey loneliness on such a powerful unconscious level. Or how a sunrise on the rim of the Grand Canyon can convey majesty beyond any human description. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

But what makes this so much better than a photo essay of great landscapes is the wonderful written content that frames the illustrations. The text brings these magnificent parks back into the realm of human beings. Again and again we read about how determined individuals, communities, businesses and even bureaucrats *created* these parks, fighting tooth and nail to preserve these natural wonders for us all. Along the way we meet all kinds of fascinating people, and learn to admire their fortitude--or chuckle at their eccentricities. The text is well assembled and flows smoothly, and is as large in its scope as the Grand Canyon itself. Absolutely riveting.

But this also brilliantly shows the character of Americans--we the people. This is a tour-de-force civics lesson on patriotism, of making the country better and making the government serve us, and should be joyously read by every American. Which, I bet, was precisely Ken Burns' goal all along.

This is a book that everyone--left, right, northerner, southerner, African-American, Latino, Caucasian... EVERYONE--should love and cherish. What an incredible country we share! And what a spectacular book that does justice to it!

Ken Burns is easily the cream of the crop when it comes to documentary film making (take that, Michael Moore!). The Civil War, The War, Baseball...his credentials go on and on. Each of his documentaries has been amazing in its own way. His latest film is called The National Parks and like its predecessors, it is accompanied by a coffee table book. I was rather surprised to see that book, with its $50 price tag, spring onto the list of bestsellers and remain there for a couple of weeks.

Coming in at over 400 pages and weighing about as much as a small car, The National Parks is chock full of both text and pictures. The book follows the same format as the film, offering six chapters that cover roughly the same material. Chapters average fifty or sixty pages and they are split roughly evenly between text and photographs. The text is interesting enough, describing the genesis of "America's best idea." The photographs are often stunning, showing some of the most amazing scenery America has to offer. My only complaint, if we can label it that, is that the paper used in the book could use a bit more gloss in order to really make those pictures pop. Nevertheless, even as they are, they provide amazing evidence of the beauty to be found in America's parks.

What gripped me as I read the book was the beautiful simplicity of the idea behind the National Parks. In days past and in other nations, the richest people, the most powerful people, had been able to have their nature preserves, their areas of unbroken and pure land. They had been able to set aside these little bits of paradise for themselves and had been able to enforce privacy, ensuring that the commoners were kept far away. In America, though-the land of free-vast areas of land were set aside specifically for the common man. The National Parks were to be held in trust by the nation for the benefit of all Americans in all of time. The parks were an investment in the future. One needs only look to Niagara Falls to see what happens when such stunning scenery goes unprotected. There is hardly a square inch of the Falls that is not in some way defiled, in some way exploited. It is due to the efforts of those who fought for the National Parks that Yellowstone and Yosemite and the Badlands and all these other areas remain largely undefiled. America's best idea is really in some ways her simplest. Many generations have benefited from it already and many more will continue to do so. America would not be what she is without her National Parks.