Will I love The Last Ranger?

If you love the National Parks but fear for their continued viability, read The Last Ranger.

Heller takes you deep into Yellowstone with a gutsy but beleaguered ranger who is only trying to do his job, protecting the animals therein and the majesty of the park from often well-meaning but ignorant tourists and poachers. The tension explodes when a fellow ranger and good friend is caught in a trap.

I loved the inside look at what park rangers are up against in performing their jobs, protecting the parks and the animals therein as well as people/tourists who endanger themselves and the enviornment by their misguided and dangerous behavior.

Ranger lit is the best. (I spend half the year working as a seasonal in one of the last great wildernesses of the east.) And I tend to really like Peter Heller's stuff - The River ranks among the finest novels of the past decade - so I was predisposed to enjoy this title. It isn't his best work, but it's a very compelling read nonetheless, following enforcement ranger Ren Hooper around Yellowstone, seeing the park through his eyes. (As a park ranger, he rings true.) A good, page-turning tale of our uneasy relationship with wild places.

Another great Peter Heller book, with the author's trademark skills in creating a suspenseful, page-turning novel in a wilderness setting on full display. This one struck me as particularly good, in part because of the focus on Yellowstone's wolves. I actually learned a lot on that score, and it was heartening to see the complexity and profundity of a wilderness animal's existence so fairly and thoroughly drawn in the pages of a popular novel. I don't know any other writer who's done this so well, actually. And in terms of this novel's philosophical underpinning, its emotional charge, and its beautiful… show more.