The Maximum of Wilderness: The Jungle in the American Imagination

Danger in the Congo! The unexplored Amazon! Long perceived as a place of mystery and danger, and more recently as a fragile system requiring our protection, the tropical forest captivated America for over a century. In The Maximum of Wilderness, Kelly Enright traces the representation of tropical forests--what Americans have typically thought of as "jungles"--and their place in both our perception of "wildness" and the globalization of the environmental movement.

In the early twentieth centu...