Conservation or recreation? National and state parks in America

Three works on US national parks offer little in the way of illustrations but instead have unrelieved earnest prose. Alfred Runte's 'National Parks: The American Experience' is the most interesting in general terms, detailing their history from the 1860s through the 1980s. Rebecca Conrad's 'Places of Quiet Beauty: Parks, Preserves and Environmentalism' describes the history of parks in Iowa, and is only partly successful in going beyond the form of a narrative local history. Charles Davis has edited 'Western Public Lands and Environmental Politics', which uses different social science perspectives to assess land usage.