Overview

The untold story of the extraordinary fight to defend American wilderness from McCarthyism, and the radical couple who led the charge--and inspired a future of conservation In late-1940s America, few writers commanded attention like Bernard DeVoto. Alongside his brilliant wife and editor, Avis, DeVoto was a firebrand of American liberty, free speech, and perhaps our greatest national treasure: public lands. But when a corrupt band of lawmakers, led by Senator Pat McCarran, sought to quietly cede millions of acres of national parks and other western lands to logging, mining, and private industry, the DeVotos entered the fight of their lives. Bernard and Avis built a broad grassroots coalition to sound the alarm--from Julia and Paul Child to Ansel Adams, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Alfred Knopf, Adlai Stevenson, and Wallace Stegner--while the very pillars of American democracy, embodied in free and public access to Western lands, hung in the balance. Their dramatic crusade would earn them censorship and blacklisting by Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and Roy Cohn, and it even cost Bernard his life. In This America of Ours, award-winning journalist Nate Schweber uncovers the forgotten story of a progressive alliance that altered the course of twentieth-century history and saved American wilderness--and our country's most fundamental ideals--from ruin.

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Nate Schweber's masterful narrative fulfills the most important agenda for books--shedding new light on a subject we already know and love. I have been reading Bernard Devoto books and essays for my entire life and only now do I understand his enormous contribution to land conservation. This is a vital book about the American experience. --Rinker Buck, New York Times bestselling author of The Oregon Trail How could we have missed the swashbuckling story of Avis and Bernard DeVoto, tribunes of public lands, free speech and liberty itself? Thankfully we have it now from Nate Schweber, in telling and rich details that make clear its ties to Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, and today's demagogue-ridden America.--Larry Tye, New York Times bestselling author of Demagogue

Author Information

NATE SCHWEBER is an award-winning journalist for the New York Times and ProPublica, among many other publications. His recent work for the Times includes investigating sexual abuse within the scholastic athletic communities and a 2016 series about murders in the Bronx that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The Outdoor Writers Association of America awarded him a conservation writing award in 2015. He has also won magazine writing awards from that organization in 2015 and 2018, respectively, for a story about a biologist for the magazine Trout, and a story about prairie conservation for the Anthony Bourdain publication Explore Parts Unknown. He has appeared on Today, CNN, and WNYC. He lives in Brooklyn.

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