Teddy Roosevelt’s battle to preserve wild America

Douglas Brinkley’s dramatic and entertaining “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America’’ tells us how an earlier generation saved endangered animal species and huge expanses of threatened wilderness. Roosevelt’s first 50 years of life can be understood anew, Brinkley argues, by concentrating on his passionate love of nature and his fight for conservation. Not quite a full biography but much more than a study of Roosevelt’s conservation policies, this grand book is about Teddy and the outdoors. Young “Teedie,’’ though a Manhattanite, learned to collect birds in his own juvenile museum of natural history, and he made his troubling asthma less daunting by getting into the woods to observe nature and climbing mountains in search of game. Roosevelt family members were, according to Brinkley, early animal-rights advocates; this includes TR’s Uncle Rob, who wrote what Brinkley calls “the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring.’ ’’ Rob urged his countrymen to clean up rivers and streams to save America’s fish, and converted his young nephew to conservation. Roosevelt’s sojourn as a rancher in the Dakotas, which Brinkley judges as his salvation from a near nervous breakdown in 1884, ignited his passion for the West. Born again under the magic of the stars, Roosevelt turned eager to urge others to recover from what Brinkley calls a “nature-deficiency disorder’’ and to preserve the beauty of wild nature. So Roosevelt wrote about what he loved...BostonGlobe