For some reason, picture books keep on popping up here at Government Book Talk. Just the other day I blogged about a Marine Corps book of photos taken in Afghanistan. Today, it’s the National Park Service (NPS), with a splendid collection of photographs taken throughout the NPS National Capital Region. A Photographer’s Path: Images of National Parks Near the Nation’s Capital is a winning collection of images highlighting nature and history in the Greater Washington DC area.
The photos, all taken by Tom Paradis of NPS, highlight the beautiful (a royal red cardinal flower with ascending blooms of scarlet, shot in DC’s own Rock Creek Park), the bizarre (a leopard/tiger-patterned stalk of the grimly named American cancer-root, taken along the George Washington Memorial Parkway), and even the glitzy (neon lights illuminating the restored amusement park arcade façade at Maryland’s Glen Echo Park). As a longtime parks visitor and Old Dominion resident, I particularly enjoyed the photos of Dyke Marsh, a wetlands paradise within shouting distance of Alexandria, Virginia. There’s a really cool shot of a verdigrised cannon at Manassas National Battlefield Park, and this park also is represented among the nature photos.
Because the photographs are really the raison d’etre of this book, text is minimal, but Megan Nortrup of NPS has done a nice job of using a minimum of words to evoke the maximum mystique of each image. A Photographer’s Path is really an extraordinarily attractive publication and a testimony both to the talents of Government employees and the marvels of America’s National Parks, even in so urbanized an area as this one. You can get a copy of this brand new book here.
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Trudy Hawkins
Government Book Talk 
