Leave It as It Is

A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt's American Wilderness

By: David Gessner

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

Length: 12 hrs and 24 mins

Publisher's summary

Best-selling 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 best-selling 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.

©2020 David Gessner. All rights reserved. (P)2020 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

Decent book

All in all it’s a pretty interesting book on Roosevelt and how a lot of public land came to be. The only parts I didn’t care for is when the author stopped being objective and let his personal feelings on the Trump administration come out and he would go on rants. The readers voice is boring and robotic.

Needs editing

Great material but an editor really needed to get in there and slash repetition, minimize some of the unrelated material. Still good info but hard to keep listening

Thought provoking

To be fair: it's not really a book about Teddy Roosevelt. It's a very relevant story about the current state of dealing with public lands. Very thought provoking although I could do without the profanaties. Very engaging and eye opening.

Great narrator as well!

Boring

The author fails to make the story engaging. Roosevelt is an interesting figure, and public lands are an emotional and important topic. Somehow the book makes them dull.

The title of the book should be changed

A more fitting title to this book would be Trump's Reduction of Bears Ears and some stuff about Theodore Roosevelt. The author spends a lot of time talking about the reductions to Bears Ears and the negative things that Trump has done. When he isn't talking about that he faults Roosevelt for having the normal views that most people has in the early 1900's when it comes to race, gender, and the American culture. If you're looking for a book about Roosevelt and his life don't listen to this one. The only positive thing about the book is that I could listen to it in a day.

Ugh, Not at All What I'd Hoped For

Gessner writes that his nephew Noah grew tired of all the Teddy Roosevelt talk and study. By the end of this book, if you make it there, you'll know exactly how he felt. I thought this would be about the places that Roosevelt took a shine to -- and their issues. Instead, this is an often tone deaf and infuriatingly sycophantic account of "T.R." Even when Gessner finds some interesting terrain to explore, he cuts short the discussion to bleat on about Roosevelt's brilliance. Gessner believes he is illustrating some of Roosevelt's "complications," but those passages come off as apologetic.