| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.2

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Wilderness Forever: Howard Zahniser and the Path to the Wilderness Act. By Mark Harvey. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005. xviii + 325 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.)

Don't underestimate the guy who lives down the block, who you see out on Saturdays mowing the lawn or cleaning the gutters, who puts his wife and four children into the station wagon for summer road trips out West, for he just may be Howard Zahniser. Mark Harvey's biography of the principal author and promoter of the Wilderness Act (1964) is a great American story of the humble, diligent servant who works within the system, making more friends than enemies while cautiously, but doggedly, pursuing his dreams to achieve enormous results. Like the wilderness that he so actively defended, Zahniser's rise in the conservation movement, his reliance on democratic principles to pass key legislation, and his conviction that raw Turnerian frontiers form the core of a nation's character are all apple pie stories, reaching to the heart of what America is supposed to mean. Howard Zahniser (1906–1964) is a marvelous portrait to paint precisely because he is such an utterly ordinary American, and Harvey's biography of the man is an excellent read precisely because of the skill at which mundane details are woven together to bring alive this Everyman champion of wilderness.

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