I hadn’t expected a book by a local man about alleged mismanagement of a national forest to be other than textbook dull. 
  I expected it to be full of graphs and tables and leaden language. 
  Sometimes authors pay to have books published because their work is poorly written and no publisher will pay them for it, but not always. 
  Sometimes authors believe so strongly in what they have to say that they lose patience with the slow process of submission and rejection before a publisher takes on the book. 
  I half expected Bill Shoaf’s book, The Taking of the Tongass: Alaska’s Rainforest, to be in the first category. I did not expect it to be what it is—a well-written non-fiction thriller with as much adventure, humor, suspense, and intrigue as a popular novel. 
  The subject of how the U.S. Forest Service manages and mismanages its domain interests me, and it would be worth my time to read the book, even if it required a struggle through a dull, poorly written treatise. 
  Bill Shoaf was a gung-ho “timber beast,” a “green shorts” career USFS timber sale planner. His business was cutting down trees. He was not a man you’d pick to become aligned with individuals and groups to whom tree stumps are an abomination. 
  Shoaf’s career with the Forest Service ended after he realized that his superiors in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest were lying about how much timber was being cut and sold, lying about how much could be cut while maintaining sustained yield, and ignoring its own environmental guidelines. 
  When he’d exhausted in-house avenues to correct mistakes and rectify wrongs, he had to chose between his loyalty to his beloved Forest Service and his own strong sense of justice and his personal integrity. 
 There is a myth that the government protects whistleblowers from retribution. What the government is more concerned with is protecting its own image, and departments within government sometimes put protecting their own behinds and budgets ahead of morality, legality, and national interest. 
  It’s not simply a battle between good guys and bad guys. Shoaf writes of his disappointment when even the environmental groups prove more interested in gaining protection for their own “favorite places” and maintaining status as the biggest and baddest environmentalists in their neck of the woods—and protecting their ability to raise more money than the other groups, of course. 
  Shoaf isn’t a head-in-the-clouds idealist. His idealism is practical and based on an immutable foundation: honesty. 
  His business is, or was, planning timber sales that are legal and that protect fish and birds and the forest itself. What he can’t stand is lying, stealing, and cheating—lying to the American people, stealing from our national forests, and cheating in the way the Forest Service sometimes does its job. 
  What Bill Shoaf ran into is old-growth bureaucracy. 
  When a government, or a corporation, creates a department and gives it a job to do, that department grows. At first it simply grows to better accomplish its mission, but it eventually cross a line. Its primary purpose changes from doing a job to sustaining its own existence and building itself into an empire. 
  Shoaf’s documented account of Forest Service abuse of trust, dereliction of duty, and criminal activity in one national forest is a prime example of bureaucratic evolution. 
  It is a book worth reading by anyone who depends on forests for livelihood, for recreation, or for spiritual sustenance. It is a book worth reading by any taxpayer who hates seeing his money thrown away. 
  If you can’t find The Taking of the Tongass in your local bookstore, write to