The Naturalist

January 25, 2016
Lunde, a supervisory museum specialist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, sheds light on Teddy Roosevelt’s interests in the natural world and his contributions to the environmental movement in this mix of biography and examination of the field of natural history preservation. Roosevelt’s interests in the natural world were evident from childhood. As a boy growing up in New York City, he collected “as many specimens as possible,” encouraging his parents to do the same when they traveled without him. By the time Roosevelt was a teenager, he had become a “full-bore birder.” At Harvard he took classes on anatomy, vertebrate physiology, and botany, hoping to emulate heroes John James Audubon and Spencer Fullerton Baird. As an adult, Roosevelt studied animals “by shooting them, stuffing them, and preserving them in natural-history museums.” According to Lunde, Roosevelt’s attraction to big-game hunting in Africa satisfied both his yearning for outdoor adventure and his intellectual curiosity. Lunde covers Roosevelt’s environmental activism and his accomplishments in political office, most notably his lobbying for the establishment of Yellowstone National Park, and impressively narrates how Roosevelt was able to pursue his passions during a contentious political career. Agent: Elaine Markson, Elaine Markson Literary Agency.

March 1, 2016
Teddy Roosevelt: not just hunter, but also gatherer. Young Theodore took inspiration from the yarns of a "novelist and adventurer" named Capt. Thomas Mayne Reid, who blended hunting, natural history, and exploration into stories guaranteed to captivate a frail and bookish lad. It was under Reid's spell, writes Smithsonian Institution mammalogist and curator Lunde, that Teddy began his own natural history collection, starting off with a much-prized seal skull (the rest of the body, we learn, was too decayed to keep) and building from there. At about the same time, he was privy to planning sessions held in his family home for what would become the American Museum of Natural History. Lunde writes that the well-connected young man could easily have become a staff curator, but, inspired by his reading and research and his father's exhortations, he headed for the wild. In this pursuit, he mirrored many other naturalists who went into the field with notebook in one hand and rifle in the other. If much of Lunde's account is a straightforward biography of Roosevelt in scientific mode, a distinct subtext is a kind of nostalgia for the natural history of old and for the "intrepid museum naturalist" whose era "may very well be coming to an end." The author turns up some interesting tidbits on the future president's expeditions, including a lion-hunting trip to Africa helped along by guides in ways that recent critics of a certain Minnesota dentist may recognize; it is useful to learn from Lunde that Roosevelt also had plenty of critics in his own time who decried his apparent bloodlust. More useful still is Lunde's portrait of Roosevelt as a kind of working amateur scientist in communication with professionals and other amateurs to build scientific institutions and, indeed, field science itself. Though a footnote to broader studies of Roosevelt, this book offers well-considered interpretations of "the brainy naturalist and muscular adventurer."

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February 15, 2016

Lunde (collection manager, Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History) uses diaries and expedition journals as well as his own fieldwork experience to present an empathetic portrait of Theodore Roosevelt as a hunter, collector, nature analyst, and conservationist. Differing from Michael Canfield's Theodore Roosevelt in the Field, which relates how adventuring influenced Roosevelt, Lunde's book stresses how the former president followed in the paths of previous and contemporary naturalists to contribute to the development of the scientific study of birds and mammals. Benefiting from pioneers such as Charles Willson Peale and Spencer Fullerton Baird, Roosevelt consulted and often worked with naturalists including George Bird Grinnell, John Burroughs, and William Temple Hornaday. Lunde describes Roosevelt's faunal studies from the age of eight through the conclusion of his Smithsonian African Expedition (1909-10), more as a specimen gatherer than a sport hunter. (Those interested in his subsequent trip to Brazil should consult Candice Millard's The River of Doubt.) America's rapid urbanization fostered a cultural reaction, in which Roosevelt participated, with a retreat to nature and ultimately society's embrace of environmentalism. VERDICT Colloquially and anecdotally written, sometimes graphically detailing the pursuit and skinning of game, this book is accessible to the lay reader and authenticated for the historian.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC

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