“This America of Ours,” by Nate Schweber (Mariner Books) This America of Ours (Mariner Books) It’s a pity that Bernard DeVoto is all but forgotten today. A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Devoto was, in the words of his biographer Nate Schweber, a “conservationist … teacher, free thinker, fighter, patriot.” DeVoto, he writes, was also “flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, running scared all his life, often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull.” The same might be said for Schweber’s “This America of Ours.” Readers will be angered and appalled at how without DeVoto’s crusades, we might have lost much of our national spaces to land-grabbers. A prodigious writer, DeVoto penned prize-winning history books, but his all-but-forgotten legacy was really in conservation.