This is a hard book to review. It isn’t really written for contemporary reading, and those who picked it up might be surprised at how much Muir writes as if for east coast botanists in 1899. It’s peppered with wonderful vignettes of Muir’s travels (and his conspicuous lack of paragraph breaks), but they are haphazardly placed among pages of descriptions of flowers and trees. And I like flowers and trees! It’s just a curious artifact of Muir’s approach, whereas I expected something more like Mark Twain’s “Roughing It”.

Muir’s reputation as an early conservationist is shown throughout, but “Our National Parks” feels more like a historical document than it is a book I’d recommend someone read. The book would massively benefit from a foreword describing its context and historiography.