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David Gessner
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Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt's American Wilderness Kindle Edition

by David Gessner (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 126 ratings
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Bestselling author David Gessner’s wilderness road trip inspired by America’s greatest conservationist, Theodore Roosevelt, is “a rallying cry in the age of climate change” (Robert Redford).

“Leave it as it is,” Theodore Roosevelt announced while viewing the Grand Canyon for the first time. “The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.” Roosevelt’s pronouncement signaled the beginning of an environmental fight that still wages today. To reconnect with the American wilderness and with the president who courageously protected it, acclaimed nature writer and New York Times bestselling author David Gessner embarks on a great American road trip guided by Roosevelt’s crusading environmental legacy.

Gessner travels to the Dakota badlands where Roosevelt awakened as a naturalist; to Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon where Roosevelt escaped during the grind of his reelection tour; and finally, to Bears Ears, Utah, a monument proposed by Native Tribes that is currently embroiled in a national conservation fight. Along the way, Gessner questions and reimagines Roosevelt’s vision for today’s lands.

“Insightful, observant, and wry,” (BookPage) Leave It As It Is offers an arresting history of Roosevelt’s pioneering conservationism, a powerful call to arms, and a profound meditation on our environmental future.
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  1. Print length
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  2. Language
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  4. Publisher
    Simon & Schuster
  5. Publication date
    August 11, 2020
  6. File size
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Gessner gives us a new Theodore Roosevelt for our times. As he travels through our national monuments and parks, he considers ways we can make 'America’s best idea' even better, uniting the park ideal with the Native ideals behind the creation of Bears Ears National Monument. The book is a thrilling journey in nature, a history of Roosevelt and the Antiquities Act, and a rallying cry in the age of climate change.”
—Robert Redford

"Gessner is an old-school wilderness-besotted warrior-poet. This book stands as a forceful reminder that, in his words, "no matter how often public lands are 'saved,' they are never really safe." Rarely is a battle cry so pleasurable to read, or pleasure so infuriating."
—Robert Moor, New York Times bestselling author of On Trails: An Exploration

“A passionate and timely argument for public lands, a brilliant exploration of Teddy Roosevelt's life and love of nature, and a wickedly wonderful read. Leave It As It Is is as thoughtful, articulate, brave, full of vigor, and dedicated to spinning thought into action as Theodore Roosevelt himself was.”
—Jennifer Ackerman, New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds and The Bird Way

“Of all that has been written about Teddy Roosevelt, this engaging book best captures TR's relentless passion for land and wildness as well as his fierceness in protecting them. David Gessner displays the full reach of Roosevelt’s vision for conservation.”
—Charles Wilkinson, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado and author of Crossing the Next Meridian

“Leave It As It Is will stretch your imagination—and it may convince you to stretch your legs in some of the remarkable terrain Roosevelt helped preserve. Theodore Roosevelt will always be a problematic character, but as Gessner shows, there are ways in which he was stretching towards the future we inhabit, and towards the past we should not destroy.”
—Bill McKibben, author of Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

“David Gessner’s scholarship, observations, and assessment of the American West comes not a minute too late. Any thunder we hear now is Theodore Roosevelt rolling over in his grave as the Trump administration proceeds with its feckless policies to liquidate our sacred public lands.”
—Rick Bass, author of For a Little While

“Facing the possible end of American democracy, Gessner revivified Theodore Roosevelt and took him west on a roadtrip to survey his legacy. At the top of his game, Gessner’s strong, intimate voice takes you along and you’ll be glad you went. What more could we need now than to remember what a president could be: a pugilist with a moral backbone, a Harvard-trained naturalist, a lover of literature who writes and speaks in complete sentences, and someone who, if born into wealth, values it far less than beauty and the survival of life on earth.”
—Jordan Fisher Smith, author of Engineering Eden

"This combination of environmental journalism, biography, and travelog introduces fascinating characters who will engage readers of environmental literature as well as Roosevelt enthusiasts."
—Library Journal

“Gessner delivers a thoughtful consideration of Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation legacy as president….[An] excellent look at the origins of environmentalism and an inspiring call to build upon what Roosevelt and other early environmentalists started.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Insightful, observant and wry, writing with his heart on his well-traveled sleeve and a laser focus on the stunning beauty of the parks, Gessner shares an epic road trip through these storied lands.”
—BookPage

"As we face environmental dangers unimagined in Roosevelt’s day, Mr. Gessner asks what TR would do with our surviving wilderness. The impassioned response: Leave it as it is."
—Wall Street Journal

About the Author

David Gessner is the author of ten books, including the New York Times bestseller All the Wild That Remains. He has taught environmental writing as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard and is currently a professor and department chair at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he founded the award-winning literary journal Ecotone. Gessner lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07Z448MW2
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Illustrated edition (August 11, 2020)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 11, 2020
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 18279 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 327 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 126 ratings

About the author

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David Gessner

David Gessner

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David Gessner is the author of thirteen books that blend a love of nature, humor, memoir, and environmentalism. His latest is A Traveler's Guide to the End of the World: Tales of Fire, Wind, and Water, of which congressman Jamie Raskin says: “This is a work of astonishing and visionary scope but also sharply intimate and grounded detail. David Gessner’s kaleidoscopic journey sweeps in mammoth forces of nature, seemingly uncontrollable forces in society and economy, and an utterly refreshing, almost heartbreaking faith in language, communication and the potential of the human word to save the human world.”

Gessner's other books include Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness, Return of the Osprey, and the New York Times-bestselling All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West. Gessner is a professor and former Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine, Ecotone. His prizes include a Pushcart Prize, the John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay, the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment’s award for best book of creative writing, and the Reed Award for Best Book on the Southern Environment. In 2017 he hosted the National Geographic Explorer show, "The Call of the Wild." He is married to the novelist Nina de Gramont, author of The Christie Affair.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
126 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Captain K
5.0 out of 5 stars Elegant Argument for Wilderness Preservation AND a Fine Biography of a Great President
Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2021
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So quickly did I run out of superlatives for this book that I am writing this review after reading only 2/3 of it. It is absolutely essential for any reader interested in wilderness protection OR the first President Roosevelt. I have recently dinged a book or two for politically correct condemnations of TR, because I believe that public figures should be allowed at least some leeway for the times in which they held sway; I might note that Gessner also presents a convincing case that Roosevelt may not have been quite as backward as modern thinking suggests, and that his views continued to evolve throughout his lifetime. Similarly, as the modern Sierra Club appears to have disowned its founder John Muir, his contributions (including to Roosevelt's thinking) should not be ignored.
Second, the book combines a likeable travelogue of TR-related sites with visionary, perhaps profound, insights into the need to preserve wilderness. Suffice it to say that those arguments go beyond mere sightseeing or even the wrongs done to Native Americans. Gessner also skewers those who argue against conservation as effectively as any writer I have read. I sometimes gloss over books that quote extensively from other experts, but in "Leave It As It Is" no quote is wasted, regardless how long, not only to show the evolution of the writer's own thinking but for general interest as well.
Simply indispensable among books this field even for someone like myself who has already gone through a bookshelf of writings by and about Roosevelt.
PS - Those readers who dinged the book because it criticizes our immediate past President have their heads buried in sand. If the chapter on Bears Ears National Monument doesn't convince you that your guy was corrupt, nothing will.
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Stephanie S Morgan
4.0 out of 5 stars Wrapping Teddy Roosevelt around Today’s Environmental Agenda
Reviewed in the United States on December 14, 2020
I was attracted to this book based on its Teddy Roosevelt marketing. I had never heard of David Gessner. He places his agenda of restoring the Bears Ears National Monument upon TR's shoulders, framed around a hipster road trip. He blames the Trump administration, ranchers, Mormons, and most of the people living in the West for destroying the West. While he champions public lands, be wants to protect them from the un-hip public - the tourists. "A hundred years from now we are going to say it was the tourists who ruined the land. We have to recognize the real enemy."

However, Gessner displays his strongest bias against the "Mormons" - more accurately members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Although he doesn’t define his label, it appears to be all Utahans except for Native Americans and his flavor of environmentalists. It's naive to assume race, politics, and environmental concern fracture along religious lines, but Gessner has no problem sneering at the "Mormons." I don't know if Gessner is really bigoted or is using his sneering to continue posturing as a hipster - in the same way he throws in profanity, drug use, and brews around the campfire.

Not an awful book - he quotes Teddy Roosevelt a lot, describes the beauty of America, recycles Douglas Chadwick's Yellowstone to Yukon proposals, and advocates for bold solutions to Western problems. I’m just not sure a Harvard-educated, North Carolinian has better solutions to Western problems than the people who actually live in the West.
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Matthew
5.0 out of 5 stars Important, smart, timely, and beautifully written!
Reviewed in the United States on September 12, 2020
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I loved this book! Apart from being strikingly timely and relevant, it's also a delightful read. David Gessner has as much of a knack for nuance as he does for sentence structure. His gorgeous writing combined with his commitment to looking at American leaders of past and present with a critical eye and his courage to call out current American leadership for its outright assault on our lands and our people make this book far more than a Teddy Roosevelt biography. This book is a stunning and well-crafted argument for protecting the American wilderness in the face of climate change, and I couldn't recommend it any more highly.
6 people found this helpful
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Hearth
5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting explanation of Bears Ears in relationship to Roosevelt and native Americans
Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2022
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This is a really interesting book. The explanation of the importance of the Bears Ears National Monument to Teddy Roosevelt and to the Native American communities is really convincing.

Well written.
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James J. Cunningham
5.0 out of 5 stars The Title Says It All
Reviewed in the United States on December 27, 2020
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An excellent exploration into T.R.'s outsized and way-ahead-of-his-time role in the movement to preserve and protect the national heritage that is our public lands.
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