{"title":"2024 Book Club","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"george-melendez-wright-the-fight-for-wildlife-and-wilderness-in-the-national-parks","title":"George Melendez Wright: The Fight for Wildlife and Wilderness in the National Parks","description":"\u003cp\u003eWhen twenty-three-year-old George Meléndez Wright arrived in Yosemite National Park in 1927 to work as a ranger naturalist—the first Hispanic person to occupy any professional position in the National Park Service (NPS)—he had already visited every national park in the western United States, including McKinley (now Denali) in Alaska. Two years later, he would organize the first science-based wildlife survey of the western parks, forever changing how the NPS would manage wildlife and natural resources. At a time when national parks routinely fed bears garbage as part of “shows” and killed “bad” predators like wolves, mountain lions, and coyotes, Wright’s new ideas for conservation set the stage for the modern scientific management of parks and other public lands. Tragically, Wright died in a 1936 car accident while working to establish parks and wildlife refuges on the US-Mexico border. To this day, he remains a celebrated figure among conservationists, wildlife experts, and park managers. In this book, Jerry Emory, a conservationist and writer connected to Wright’s family, draws on hundreds of letters, field notes, archival research, interviews, and more to offer both a biography of Wright and a historical account of a crucial period in the evolution of US parks and the wilderness movement. With a foreword by former NPS director Jonathan B. Jarvis, George Meléndez Wright is a celebration of Wright’s unique upbringing, dynamism, and enduring vision that places him at last in the pantheon of the great American conservationists.\u003c\/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003e199 pages, hardcover \u003c\/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eThis was the November 2024 Glacier National Park Conservancy Book Club selection. Watch the Zoom book club discussion with author Jerry Emory here. \u003c\/p\u003e\n  ","brand":"Glacier Conservancy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44842021879877,"sku":"803029","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0714\/5311\/4437\/files\/George_Melendez__37791.1713467342.1280.1280.jpg?v=1777406564"},{"product_id":"crooked","title":"Crooked","description":"\u003cp\u003eMany tales from the Jazz Age reek of crime and corruption. But perhaps the era’s greatest political fiasco—one that resulted in a nationwide scandal, a public reckoning at the Department of Justice, the rise of J. Edgar Hoover, and an Oscar-winning film—has long been lost to the annals of history. In Crooked , Nathan Masters restores this story of murderers, con artists, secret lovers, spies, bootleggers, and corrupt politicians to its full, page-turning glory. Newly elected to the Senate on a promise to root out corruption, Burton \"Boxcar Burt\" Wheeler sets his sights on ousting Attorney General Harry Daugherty, puppet-master behind President Harding’s unlikely rise to power. Daugherty is famous for doing whatever it takes to keep his boss in power, and his cozy relations with bootleggers and other scofflaws have long spawned rumors of impropriety. But when his constant companion and trusted fixer, Jess Smith, is found dead of a gunshot wound in the apartment the two men share, Daugherty is suddenly thrust into the spotlight, exposing the rot consuming the Harding administration to a shocked public. Determined to uncover the truth in the ensuing investigation, Wheeler takes the prosecutorial reins and subpoenas a rogue’s gallery of witnesses—convicted felons, shady detectives, disgraced officials—to expose the attorney general’s treachery and solve the riddle of Jess Smith’s suspicious death. With the muckraking senator hot on his trail, Daugherty turns to his greatest weapon, the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose eager second-in-command, J. Edgar Hoover, sees opportunity amidst the chaos. Packed with political intrigue, salacious scandal, and no shortage of lessons for our modern era of political discord, Nathan Masters’ thrilling historical narrative shows how this intricate web of inconceivable crookedness set the stage for the next century of American political scandals.\u003c\/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003e289 pages, hardcover\u003c\/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eThis was the January 2024 Glacier National Park Conservancy Book Club selection. Watch the Zoom book club discussion with author Nathan Masters here. \u003c\/p\u003e\n  ","brand":"Glacier Conservancy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44842021912645,"sku":"803026","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0714\/5311\/4437\/files\/Crooked__81117.1713467306.1280.1280.jpg?v=1777406565"},{"product_id":"ranger-confidential","title":"Ranger Confidential","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor twelve years, Andrea Lankford lived in the biggest, most impressive national parks in the world, working a job she loved. She chaperoned baby sea turtles on their journey to sea. She pursued bad guys on her galloping patrol horse. She jumped into rescue helicopters bound for the heart of the Grand Canyon. She won arguments with bears. She slept with a few too many rattlesnakes. Hell yeah, it was the best job in the world! Fortunately, Andrea survived it. In this graphic and yet surprisingly funny account of her and others’ extraordinary careers, Lankford unveils a world in which park rangers struggle to maintain their idealism in the face of death, disillusionment, and the loss of a comrade killed while holding that thin green line between protecting the park from the people, the people from the park, and the people from each other. Ranger Confidential is the story behind the scenery of the nation’s crown jewels—Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Great Smokies, Denali. In these iconic landscapes, where nature and humanity constantly collide, scenery can be as cruel as it is redemptive.\u003c\/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003e240 pages, softcover\u003c\/p\u003e\n \u003cp\u003eThis was the May 2024 Glacier National Park Conservancy Book Club selection. Watch the Zoom book club discussion with author Andrea Lankford here.\u003c\/p\u003e\n  ","brand":"Glacier Conservancy","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44842021945413,"sku":"803017","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0714\/5311\/4437\/files\/Ranger_Confidential__48469.1713466972.1280.1280.jpg?v=1777406566"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.glacier.org\/collections\/2024-book-club.oembed","provider":"Glacier National Park Conservancy","version":"1.0","type":"link"}