Reviews
What People Are Saying
Praise for An Exaltation of Parks: John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Crusade to Save America’s Wonderlands:
“Steve Kemp’s book, An Exaltation of Parks: John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Crusade to Save America’s Wonderlands, is an extraordinary accomplishment of a story that might have seemed overwhelming but instead reads like a novel. Steve’s writing is beautiful and his characterization of Junior (as he refers to him) is personal and empathic without being saccharine. The magnitude and expansiveness of Junior’s philanthropy is described as thoughtful, strategic, and persistent.
As his granddaughter, the story of JDR Jr’s philanthropy makes me proud. If you are a lover of National Parks, an aspiring philanthropist, or simply a person curious about how wealthy people can leave the world better than how they found it, this is the book for you. It is a blueprint for how to make a difference in the world. My grandfather was lucky to find his passion, following it with careful consideration, and completing it with persistence. I cannot recommend An Exaltation of Parks highly enough.”
-Eileen Rockefeller
Author, Being a Rockefeller, Becoming Myself
“Rockefeller Jr. was 41 years old when a letter from Harvard President Charles W. Eliot changed the course of his life—and the future of national parks in America. Eliot sought money and support to preserve Mount Desert Island in Maine, where the Rockefellers loved to spend their summers, as public land. The effort culminated with the creation of Acadia National Park in 1916.
Rockefeller Jr., a shy, socially awkward man who Kemp describes as “kind of a nature nerd,” quickly recognized the importance of the national park effort and became a central figure in conservation projects across the country. All told, he donated the equivalent of $800 million in today’s dollars to expand the national park system. His steepest uphill battle came in the Tetons, where the park service convinced him to purchase 31,000 acres for the future Grand Teton National Park. When Wyoming officials fought the land’s transfer to the federal government, Rockefeller Jr. was forced to hold it for 24 years, paying property taxes the whole time.
“Those prerequisites of respecting the beauty of nature and mental health and the landscape architecture background and the pride in duty that he felt every minute of his life primed him to become that person who really accelerated development of the national parks,” Kemp said. “Nobody else would have fought 24 years for Jackson Hole [in the Tetons].”
Continue reading in the Asheville Citizen-Times
-Holly Kays
From Asheville Citizen-Times, August 15, 2025
“No one could be better suited to write the story of John D. Rockefeller’s contribution to the national parks than Steve, for he has intimate experience with Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains, and Acadia – all the national parks that were most benefited by Rockefeller’s philanthropy. Steve’s deep love for these places and his great respect for the National Park Service shines through in this important, timely book.
Steve delivers an engaging portrait of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the private, reserved, principled, idealistic only son and heir to the largest family fortune in early twentieth-century America. The high-stakes courtship between the fledgling National Park Service and the good billionaire is the stuff of a psychological thriller, and Steve tells it with verve and humor. In dramatic scene shifts that take the reader from dusty western parks to the Rockefeller mansion in New York City, from the Mesa Verde superintendent’s humble adobe to the Rockefeller summer “cottage” in what is now Acadia National Park, Steve shows how the parks’ administrators carefully bridged class lines to construct a public-private partnership for the ages.
Steve makes a strong case that Rockefeller’s peerless philanthropy to the National Park System from the 1920s through the 1950s is not just a historical artifact but a challenge to the nation’s present crop of billionaire philanthropists. This book is a clarion call to preserve more parklands for future generations before it is too late. Steve argues compellingly that in our new Gilded Age in the twenty-first century, private philanthropy akin to Rockefeller’s may be our only viable path forward.”
-Theodore Catton
Author, Historian, Winner, George Perkins Marsh Prize for Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in Alaska and the Weyerhaeuser Book Award for American Indians and National Forests.
“I greatly admire your ability to translate research and science into people-speak in ways that connects with your readers and still remains memorable and stylish prose with a healthy dose of wry humor thrown in. It's a rare quality, especially these days.”
-Linda Masterson, Communications and Marketing Director
The BearWise® Program
“Just returned from a November visit to the park and wanted to let you know that the Smokies Guide, your park newspaper, is the very best park newspaper I’ve seen. As a retired NPS ranger, I’ve seen many of these, as you can imagine. But this one was actually helpful (!) and educational.”
-Rita J.
GSMNP visitor
“I have been a member for years and received my copy [of Smokies Life Magazine] last week. I think that was an OUTSTANDING article!! I saw…over at Oconoluftee Visitors Center and talked a lot about the article/magazine. He said he thought [it] might be their biggest seller.”
-Noland Smathers
Member of SmokiesLife organization
“But the fellow who deserves most of the credit for this publication is Steve Kemp. In addition to being one of the writers, he is one of three editors, and was coordinator of the entire project. He works for the Natural History Association, and his title is publications specialist. It ought to be publications wizard…. He is a patient fellow who keeps plugging away until the job is done just about perfectly. He can write. He can edit. He can dicker with authors, artists, cartographers and printers.”
-Carson Brewer
Knoxville News Sentinel
“Hiking Trails of the Smokies is a real masterpiece—so comprehensive yet so compact and easy to read. The book should interest a lot more readers than just hikers, with all the fascinating bits of information on the cultural, historic, and natural aspects tied to each trail description.”
-Wayne Shepherd
Great Smoky Mountains Association Board Chair
“Great Smoky Mountains Association (GSMA), a nonprofit organization that partners with Great Smoky Mountains National Park, has again won an award for the design and content of its Smokies Guide [park newspaper]. Steve Kemp, who co-edits the guide with Kent Cave, said the association has won the award each of the past 10 years.”
-Candace Grimm
The Mountain Press [newspaper]
“From 500 away, the Kaimin remains as delightful a telescope as ever into the ritual, recurring bizarreness that characterizes UM [University of Montana]. My especial congratulations to the perpetrator of “Weather or Not” —it’s the sort of twisted…ah, thing…that fits the Kaimin and the campus perfectly. Please continue the good work.”
-Leroy Berven
The Kaimin is half AP releases, which provides exercise only for the copysetter, not the reporting staff. Sadly, the only vital part of it is “Weather or Not.”
-unknown
“’Weather or not” we like it? I do.”
-Deborah J. Davis
[Steve Kemp anonymously wrote the daily weather forecast/hard-boiled detective novel parody for the Montana Kaimin while a student at the University of Montana.]