NONFICTION - July 21, 1991

THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE: A 75th Anniversary Album compiled by William Sontag and Linda Griffin (Roberts Rinehart Publishers: $30, cloth; $19.95, paper; 160 pp). Selecting these 100 photographs from the collections of individual national parks and from park service archives (in Denver and Harper’s Ferry) must have been a delightful job. There’s a little of everything here: a 1900 photo of the Holmes Brothers of San Jose, perched on their Stanley Steamer, the second car to enter in Yosemite valley; early climbing and skiing shots; wonderful portraits of guides, naturalists and park rangers, who make clear the inspiration for their later mascot Smokey the Bear. Theodore Roosevelt nixed the idea of bridges spanning the Grand Canyon with the comment: “The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it”; yet he ironically became one of the four Presidents carved in Mt. Rushmore, shown here as it neared completion in 1941.