One positive outcome of this plague unpleasantness is I have been able to make a dent in my seemingly always-growing stack of unread books. One of the more enjoyable reading excursions was Roger L. Di Silvestro’s “Theodore Roosevelt in the Badlands”. In June 1884, a 24-year old Theodore Roosevelt arrived in the Badlands a broken man. Both his wife and his mother had died just four months previously (on the same day) and the slight, anemic, and urban-dwelling Roosevelt came to the Badlands seeking escape, recovery, reinvention and, it must be said, business opportunities. In a relatively short three-year tenure in the Badlands, Roosevelt achieved all of these things. He embarked on exciting hunts for bison and grizzly, nearly dueled a sometime friend and sometime adversary (fellow rancher, the Marquis de Mores) over a grazing rights dispute, engaged in fisticuffs in a barroom brawl, hunted down a group of thieving ne’er-do-wells during a raging winter storm, gradually earned the respect of both rough-and-ready cowboys and reticent townsfolk, and built a ranch and bought a herd of cattle before realizing ranching’s bleak prospects and selling out. Roosevelt returned from this experience a changed man and it stuck with him throughout the remainder of his life. His experience in the Badlands provided a personal example of what it meant to live an adventurous and active life while also reinforcing his appreciation for wild American landscapes and serving as the impetus for some of his later groundbreaking policies on conservation. This was a fascinating and formative period in Roosevelt’s life and it is one that the author recounts in an engaging and readable way. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Highly recommended.