Description: A poignant and thought-provoking work, Requiem for America's Best Idea investigates the interactions between people and nature and the world that can inspire and destroy them.
Brief description: Michael J. Yochim (1966-2020) worked for twenty-two years at Yellowstone National Park as well as at Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Sequoia. His books include Yellowstone and the Snowmobile: Locking Horns over National Park Use, A Week in Yellowstone's Thorofare: A Journey Through the Remotest Place, Essential Yellowstone: A Landscape of Memory and Wonder, and Protecting Yellowstone: Science and the Politics of National Park Management (UNM Press).
Review Quotes: What an amazing book. Yochim manages to parallel the long-term destruction of our National Parks and wild lands--due to rising temperatures, receding glaciers, fire, and climate change in general--with his own physical decline due to the curse of ALS. I have been to the places he remembers in this book, and I must say he reconstructs their beauty in ways few of us could. This is truly a tragic work: the story of a man in his last moments alive holding onto a world of beauty that we are destroying.--Kevin Mattson, Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History at Ohio University and author of We're Not Here to Entertain: Punk Rock, Ronald Reagan, and the Real Culture War of 1980s America