The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday and His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century were a brutal time for American wildlife, with many species pushed to the brink of extinction. (Some are endangered to this day.) And yet these decades also saw the dawn of the conservationist movement. Into this contradictory era came William Temple Hornaday, a larger-than-life dynamo who almost uncannily embodies these conflicting threads in our history.

In The Most Defiant Devil, a compelling new biography of this complex figure, Gregory Deh...