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Ranger Confidential: Living, Working, And Dying In The National Parks (2010)

by Andrea Lankford(Favorite Author)

3.76 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0762752637 (ISBN13: 9780762752638)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

FalconGuides

review 1: If you ever wanted to be a park ranger, this book might change your mind. Andrea Lankford's stories are sometimes entertaining, and often depressing. It certainly made me appreciate more the great conversation our group had with a ranger outside the canteen at Phantom Ranch (at the bottom of Grand Canyon). That ranger was a terrific ambassador for the park system, and her lecture that afternoon about park geology was wonderful. I hope she doesn't burn out, as apparently many rangers do.
review 2: There were a lot of things I learned from this book. It certainly gave me insight into the challenges facing Rangers in their work and into the beauty and dangers of some of the great national parks (Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Danali). I am happy I read it because I feel ... morethat reading it is a sort of a tribute to the Rangers who risk their lives to help others, and work under difficult conditions, many without even the benefit of a decent salary. The public not only doesn't appreciate their work but often is at loggerheads with them.However, the book had a few major flaws. First, it lacked any sort of organizational structure. It could have been organized by park, or by person(the book follows the lives of a handful of rangers, including the narrator) - but instead it kind of just jumps around from one figure to another, and one venue to another. It's hard to remember who is whom, or to know which person to pay attention to (because he/she will turn up again later in the book) The jump from chapter to chapter seems to be more a kind of stream of consciousness of the writer than anything else.Much of the description of events also could use more tension. One or two events are written in a way which builds tension, but many events are described briefly and without much tension. All this lead to making the book rather easy to put down. A bigger flaw for me is that the book could be called a kind of personal memoir if it weren't for the fact that it remains very impersonal. The narrator doesn't even have a name. (turns out it is Andrea...I should have paid more attention to the title page - I didn't even realize she was a woman for about the first 20 pages - the name Andrea doesn't appear in the book). Even stranger is the way the writer glosses over important personal events in her life. Her personal relationships with other RANGERS get some attention, but her relationship with her boyfriend is hardly given any attention. We see her almost exclusively in her persona of Ranger/worker and practically not at all as woman/person/human being. It would be nice if under the professional stoic, unemotional mask of a Ranger on duty, we would find a live, vibrant human being, instead of a professional stoic person. She does have a few pages about the challenge of being a woman in this very male dominated field, but in general, the book is a description of events. We realize that the emotional impact was great.. the narrator eventually finds the job too much - but whereas in some places the narrator was able to convey emotion to the readers, in other places, I felt a certain lack of emotion. All in all, an enlightening book, and worth reading despite the flaws. less

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