Rutkow - American canopy: the role of trees in the shaping of a nation

Praise for American Canopy

Rutkow is clearly enraptured by his topic and, like another great popular historian, David McCullough, has a knack for making the reader enraptured as well.

Chicago Tribune

There is much in this book on the prevalence of wood products in our life, but more on their deeper significance. This book is not merely a history, but an eloquent advocate of, as Rutkow writes, how trees change from enemy, to friend, to potential savior.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Readers will come away from this, Rutkows first book, with a greater appreciation of the role of both forests and trees in our ongoing national story.

The Washington Post

A lively story of driven personalities, resources that were once thought to be endless, brilliant ideas, tragic mistakes, and the evolution of the United States. Rutkow has cut through Americas use and love of trees to reveal the rings of our nations history and the people who have helped shape it.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

An excellent book for both academics and general readers, this is highly recommended.

Library Journal

An even-handed and comprehensive history that could not be more relevant... The woods, Rutkows history reminds us again and again, are essential to our humanity.

Bloomberg Business Week

A deeply fascinating survey of American history through a particularly interesting angle: down through the boughs of our vanished trees.

The Boston Globe

For those who see our history through the traditional categories of politics, economics, and culture, a delightful feast awaits. In this remarkably inventive book, Eric Rutkow looks at our national experience through the lens of our magnificent trees, showing their extraordinary importance in shaping how we lived, thrived, and expanded as a people. A beautifully written, devilishly original piece of work.

David M. Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Polio: An American Story

Right from its quietly shocking preludethe cavalier and surprisingly recent murder of the oldest living thing in North AmericaEric Rutkows splendid saga shows, through a chain of stories and biographical sketches that are intimate, fresh, and often startling, how trees have shaped every aspect of our national life. Here is the tree as symbol and as tool, as companion and enemy, as a tonic for our spirits and the indispensable ingredient of our every enterprise from the colonization voyages to the transcontinental railroad to Levittown. The result, both fascinating and valuable, is a sort of shadow history of America. Toward the end of his finest novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes that the vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsbys house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. American Canopy retrieves those trees and does full-rigged (on tall, white-pine masts) justice to the dream.

Richard Snow, author of A Measureless Peril and former editor in chief of American Heritage

American Canopy marks the debut of an uncommonly gifted young historian and writer. Ranging across four centuries of history, Eric Rutkow shows the manifold ways in which treesand woodlandand woodhave shaped the contours of American life and culture. And because he has managed to build the story around gripping events and lively characters, the book entertains as much as it informs. All in all, a remarkable performance!

John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University and author of Entertaining Satan , winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History, and The Unredeemed Captive , finalist for the National Book Award

This fascinating and groundbreaking work tells the remarkable story of the relationship between Americans and their trees across the entire span of our nations history.

Like many of us, historians have long been guilty of taking trees for granted. Yet the history of trees in America is no less remarkable than the history of the United States itselffrom the majestic white pines of New England, which were coveted by the British Crown for use as masts in navy warships, to the orange groves of California, which lured settlers west. In fact, without the countrys vast forests and the hundreds of tree species they contained, there would have been no ships, docks, railroads, stockyards, wagons, barrels, furniture, newspapers, rifles, or firewood. No shingled villages or whaling vessels in New England. No New York City, Miami, or Chicago. No Johnny Apple-seed, Paul Bunyan, or Daniel Boone. No Allied planes in World War I, and no suburban sprawl in the middle of the twentieth century. Americaif indeed it existedwould be a very different place without its millions of acres of trees.

As Eric Rutkows brilliant, epic account shows, trees were essential to the early years of the republic and indivisible from the countrys rise as both an empire and a civilization. Among American Canopy s many fascinating stories: the Liberty Trees, where colonists gathered to plot rebellion against the British; Henry David Thoreaus famous retreat into the woods; the creation of New York Citys Central Park; the great fire of 1871 that killed a thousand people in the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin; the fevered attempts to save the American chestnut and the American elm from extinction; and the controversy over spotted owls and the old-growth forests they inhabited. Rutkow also explains how trees were of deep interest to such figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR, who oversaw the planting of more than three billion trees nationally in his time as president.

As symbols of liberty, community, and civilization, trees are perhaps the loudest silent figures in our countrys history. America started as a nation of people frightened of the deep, seemingly infinite woods; we then grew to rely on our forests for progress and profit; by the end of the twentieth century we came to understand that the globes climate is dependent on the preservation of trees. Today, few people think about where timber comes from, but most of us share a sense that to destroy trees is to destroy part of ourselves and endanger the future.

Never before has anyone treated our countrys trees and forests as the subject of a broad historical study, and the result is an accessible, informative, and thoroughly entertaining read. Audacious in its four-hundred-year scope, authoritative in its detail, and elegant in its execution, American Canopy is perfect for history buffs and nature lovers alike and announces Eric Rutkow as a major new author of popular history.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR A MERICAN C ANOPY

For those who see our history through the traditional categories of politics, economics, and culture, a delightful feast awaits. In this remarkably inventive book, Eric Rutkow looks at our national experience through the lens of our magnificent trees, showing their extraordinary importance in shaping how we lived, thrived, and expanded as a people. A beautifully written, devilishly original piece of work.

David M. Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Polio: An American Story

Both delightful and enlighteninga book filled with fascinations and surprises about a subject I had never thought about (much less read about) before. That its written with such charm and grace only intensifies its appeal.