LITERATURE + LECTURES

Brazos Bookstore is pleased to present Douglas Brinkley, who signs and discusses his latest book, The Wilderness Warrior,  Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.

TR's love of the outdoors is, of course, well known, but Brinkley proposes a thesis far more grand and significant. He argues that it was Roosevelt's ambitious Wild America program that turned conservationism into a universal endeavor. By tracing lines of influence on the future president's thought, he explains how the insights of people like Audobon, Darwin, John Burroughs, and John Muir shaped Roosevelt's Gospel of Preservation environmental actions. A superb choice for anyone who loves history and/or the environment.

Douglas Brinkley is the fellow in history at the Baker Institute and a professor of history at Rice University. He completed his bachelor’s degree at The Ohio State University and received his doctorate in U.S. diplomatic history from Georgetown University. He then spent a year teaching history at the U.S. Naval Academy and Princeton University. Before coming to Rice, Brinkley served as professor of history and director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilization at Tulane University.

From 1994 to 2005 he was the Stephen E. Ambrose Professor of History and director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. Brinkley’s most recent publications include The Reagan Diaries (2007), which he edited, and the New York Times best-seller The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2006), which was the recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

He has received honorary doctorates from Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. Brinkley is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times Book Review and American Heritage, as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly. In a recent profile, the Chicago Tribune deemed him “America’s new past master.”