What's the Big Idea?

For Edward Curtis, it was preserving a multitude of vanishing cultures via any medium available. 100 years too early to be understood, he worked exhaustively to record the rites, cultures, images and languages of Native Americans before "civilization" wiped their ways from the planet. This book is a beautifully researched and written memoir of the lengths to which Curtis and his sidekicks went to this end, and the quickly eroding natural world which had supported these cultures for centuries. Ed was a brilliant, self-educated combination of technophile and mountain man, truly having one foot in each world. Ultimately a hero to the peoples he loved, and a villain to the woman who loved him, Curtis' story is well worth reading.