Last Stand: A Riveting Exposé of Environmental Pillage and a Lone Journalist's Struggle to Keep Faith

by Richard Manning

"An unusual and brave book, one that demonstrates that personal integrity is more important than received professional wisdom."— The Los Angeles Times Book Review

In 1988 Richard Manning, a reporter for the Montana Missoulian , blew the whistle on two out-of-state logging companies that had clear-cut a swath the size of Delaware through the forests of the Northern Rockies. Manning's articles won his paper an award but cost him his job. In Montana logging is big business, with a very long arm, and very few newspapers have the courage to offend the industry. This galvanizing and courageous book is at once the story of Manning's personal odyssey and a front line report on the destruction of the American woodlands and its cover up by much of the press. As path-clearing investigative journalism, Last Stand  evokes comparison with the work of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein; as an impassioned defense of nature, it belongs to the great tradition that extends from John Muir to Edward Abbey. 

192 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1991

Reviews

[Curtis Anthony Bozif · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mid-career Montana newspaper man writing his first book. Interesting to see in this book the seeds being laid that would ultimately lead to the ideas and the later books Manning is most known for like Grassland, Against the Grain, Rewilding the West, etc.

[Abby Rodgers · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read about the lumber industry and forest service, but I feel like it could have been 100 pages shorter. After he published the main story I wasn’t as interested in the journalism politics and other things he went into. He did had some beautiful descriptions of the forest and life there.

[Belle Meade School]

333.75

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall this is a compelling book. It is however, uneven, and challenging in sections in that the author ranges in many different areas that affect the cohesiveness of his overall point. I enjoyed this book a great deal and it is full of great details on Montana and forestry and the banality of evil of private industry's abuse of natural resources.

[Tattered Cover Book Store]

Author Rick Bass recomended this book as part of the Rocky Mountain Land Library's "A Reading List For the President Elect: A Western Primer for the Next Administration."