If put together end to end, the volume of words produced about Theodore Roosevelt might stretch around the globe several times, and yet Michael R. Canfield, in Theodore Roosevelt in the Field, succeeds in providing new insights into the twenty-sixth president's personality and accomplishments. He does so by focusing on Roosevelt's lifelong love affair with direct experience of the natural world (i.e., “the field”). A field biologist himself, Canfield draws upon his own knowledge of scientists' holistic observational practices to elucidate how Roosevelt encountered nature as an organic landscape yielding inexhaustible sensations. He makes a persuasive argument for the claim that disparate elements of Roosevelt's life—naturalist, rancher, soldier, conservationist, writer, father—can best be understood as repeating patterns of “a cycle that began with reading and observation, grew into direct contact through action in the outdoors, and then looped back to his own renderings of those experiences in his stories and writings” (14).

Canfield begins his book with a vignette describing Roosevelt at the height of his career, in the White House, posing for a portrait by John Singer Sargent, but he then moves his narrative back to the 1860s in order to incorporate the young Roosevelt's near-obsession with what was, at the time, still known as “natural history.” Canfield perhaps reads too much into the future president's admittedly charming juvenilia—surely many children find animals fascinating and enjoy drawing pictures of them—but he is on more certain ground once he moves to a discussion of Roosevelt as a young man, struggling with a passion for field observation that placed him in conflict with his Harvard biology teachers, devoted as they were to the laboratory as the emerging standard for knowledge production in the life sciences. Canfield touches upon the relatively well-known story of Roosevelt's courtship of and engagement to Alice Lee, his rejection of science for financial as well as economic reasons, and the tragedy of Alice's death on the same day as his adored mother; he also quickly sketches Roosevelt's eventual remarriage and embarkation on family life. He notes essential episodes in Roosevelt's political life, but events that would loom large in a conventional biography, such as the 1912 bid for president, are handled quickly.

Canfield argues that “Ultimately, Roosevelt was never content to experience life as a witness from an armchair: in his studies of biology he had eschewed the relative comforts of the laboratory for study of animals in their natural habitat … on hunts he had followed even the most ferocious animals to their burrows and dens. Roosevelt had always worked to be in the middle of the action” (185). Canfield's study charts how this passion to be “in the middle of the action” influenced Roosevelt's formation of the Rough Riders, commitment to resource conservation and the creation of nature reserves, and enthusiastic pursuit of big game in Africa. Even as his health declined, the fifty-five-year-old Roosevelt undertook an expedition in the Amazon jungle, determined to once again get out of “the armchair” and into the spaces where, it is evident, he felt most alive. When not in the field, Roosevelt sought out people, such as naturalist John Burroughs and safari hunter Frederick Selous, who could share their stories of outdoors action via correspondence and visits. To stay still was in some sense to surrender life. Canfield also notes, however, that Roosevelt never was content merely to experience something and then move on. Instead, he wrote prolifically and skillfully about his life in the field, sharing his narratives of outdoors adventure with a wide audience in the popular periodicals of the day as well as in book-length writings. For Roosevelt, experience and narrative together created the field.

Canfield situates Roosevelt's love of the field in multiple contexts. He is most persuasive when interpreting Roosevelt's scientific interests in the American tradition of natural historians such as John James Audubon, adventurers who combined literature, art, and hunting prowess with serious scientific study. Canfield's own scientific knowledge also enriches the book's discussions of the behavior of the various species that caught Roosevelt's attention in the field. Efforts to relate Roosevelt's Amazon journey to other exploration ventures, such as the Shackleton Antarctic expedition, sit on somewhat less-solid ground, mostly consisting of the pointing out of parallels and similarities.

Roosevelt in the Field should appeal to general readers as well as professional scholars. Canfield writes well and with obvious affection for his subject, and his book contains many beautiful reproductions of pages from the Roosevelt family archive as well as from multiple pictorial sources from the period. If he does not plumb the cultural depths that lay beneath Roosevelt's fascination with the field as a testing ground for white manliness, he succeeds in marshalling abundant evidence for the field as a meaningful lens through which to view Roosevelt's life, writings, and influence.