This is a strange but thoroughly enjoyable book. The author crafts beautiful sentences and paragraphs and has a lot of important things to say about how Americans understood, represented, and altered the landscapes across which they moved in the nineteenth century. This book also explores the ways in which the trauma of the Civil War left a heavy imprint of the memories of the Americans who survived it. Writing something new about iconic figures such as Jefferson, Thoreau, or Whitman is not an easy task, and yet I think the author has a firm grasp of their personalities and how they understood their personal relationships with Nature. This book also introduced me to some new historical figures such as Horace Cleveland, the landscape architect responsible for the magnificent park system in Minneapolis and the author of a gem of an essay titled "The Influence of Parks on the Character of Children." Fans of Richard Louv and other proponents of unstructured outdoor play will feel a strong affinity for Cleveland and others like him.
It's hard to say how much of an authorial presence belongs in a work of history, but I found myself struggling with a few passages that seemed staged or self-indulgent. I suppose all history is at some level autobiography, but this book travels a mighty long way in that direction. I also was surprised that the author made no mention of Keith Thomas' "Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800." To be sure, that work covers a different time and place, but the prose is crisp and a model for writing about shifting mentalities, particularly changing attitudes toward nature. Nineteenth-century American authors were greatly influenced by English authors and English ways, and I believe that's especially true of New England's authors. Thomas' book would have helped the author more fully illuminate these continuities including that vision of Arcadia's demise as tragedy rather than progress.
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