Good portrait of an interesting, challenging figure. It has a fairly strong bias, but gives enough information for you to make up your own mind. Tompkins cared greatly about aesthetics and design, and eventually concluded that the best way to add beauty to the world was to conserve nature. He found cost-effective ways of making major changes. He was also sometimes hypocritical and selfish.

> From the first days of dating and through marriage with Susie, he’d always made it very clear that four months a year—sometimes six—he would disappear over the horizon: no permissions asked, no excuses needed. For those four months a year he was not husband, nor father nor CEO. He was just Doug, out in the bush with buddies, experiencing a time when he could test himself and embark on hair-raising trips that most people only read about in magazines. Yvon agreed with his close friend. “If you can’t have three or four months a year for what you really love, you are in the wrong job,” Yvon declared

> Doug and Susie Tompkins, the hippest of the hip in San Francisco, nourished a workplace so employee-centric that some called it a cult. In addition to free Italian classes, kayak excursions, and company-wide Halloween parties, Tompkins pressured his workers to leave town. To go away. To escape. “Frankly, I don’t want to underwrite anything that’s just a vacation,” he said. “Everybody can take a vacation lying on the beach in Hawaii, but how many people will really go rafting in the Himalayas? It’s a win-win situation. The individual will heighten their sensibilities about being alive, and if they are alive and more dynamic, the by-product goes to their organization.” ( )

Douglas Tompkins founded The North Face in 1960s era San Francisco; then Esprit clothing company in the 80s. He hung out with Grateful Dead, Janice Joplin and other royalty. He has been compared rightly to Steve Jobs for his forward vision and attention to design (really Jobs is comparable to Tompkins). He was also a devout environmentalist and adventurer who spent 3-4 months a year on expeditions in the wild. So in the 1990s after he sold his businesses for 150 million he moved to Patagonia and started buying up land. Lots of it, setting up a decades long fight with timber and ranching interests. He intended to conserve it and donate it back to Chile as a national park. As a person he was said to do more in one week then most people do in a month, a frenetic super-charged dynamo who inspired the entire country of Chile to build huge national parks, becoming a global model of conservation.

Jonathan Franklin is an American journalist based in Chile who writes on South American topics and has followed the career of Tompkins, the book is based on original interviews with dozens of people. It has all the right elements for good non-fiction: strong main character, a good plot (little guy vs. Goliath) , adventure and exotic locales, informative. And a strong though sad ending, bringing events to the present. It leaves you feeling a bit hopeful and positive towards humanity, Tompkins showed we can pay our due the natural world, give something back for what we take. ( )