The authors of Forestry in the U.S. South are timber executives and professional foresters, not professional historians. Their book reflects their profession. It is more a celebration of corporate forestry than the complete story that such a broad title would reflect. It tells an accurate story of public-private collaborations in the development of professional forestry in the South, but as a history of an industry, it falls well short of a full picture.

The early story of southern timbering is well known. After two centuries of postcontact clearing for cotton and other crops, as well as serving as a commons for hunting and gathering, the southern pine forests began falling to the chainsaws of industry in the late nineteenth century. The book's authors are less interested in this earlier history, devoting only a few pages to the region's original cutover. They pick up the story with the rise of the forestry profession in the early twentieth century and focus on the growing cooperation between government officials, university forestry researchers, and timber company executives in the years before World War II that came to productive fruition after the war.

The authors are effective at detailing how this growing public-private cooperation created a burgeoning forestry industry in the post-1945 South. University research on soil types, propagation, seed orchards, tree selection, and many other endeavors provided private, state, and federal foresters with a growing body of scientific information to create economically productive forests. Federal investment in education and the nation's growing timber needs after World War II led to unprecedented funding for forestry research, as well as a growing number of students who found jobs working in forestry, both for the government and in the private sector. These graduates worked for companies like Weyerhaeuser, Westvaco, and International Paper, doing research that helped create efficient forest management practices and solid profit margins. State forestry programs in Texas, Florida, and North Carolina are each given sections of the book. The authors detail specific southern university programs and forestry professors engaging in this research, including at Auburn University, North Carolina State University, and Florida State University.

But the focus on specific university programs and researchers also reflects the book's weaknesses. Unfortunately, it exists more to celebrate the achievements of these corporations and researchers than to analyze their impact upon the South. Superlatives about timber executives abound—they show “visionary leadership” over mundane matters and inevitably do the right thing on everything from research programs to environmental management. Even the book's only blurb is from a timber industry executive. The writing also tends to rely on long lists of names and chapter sections that consist of paragraphs on what individual companies did on a given issue. The authors seem more concerned with ensuring each major industry player received its due than interrogating the industry's impact.

The book's brief mention of labor relations shows the limitations of this corporate-oriented approach. It ignores the long history of worker exploitation by the timber industry, including how the terrible working conditions and low wages both reflected and exacerbated racial inequality. It notes the facts about the Fair Labor Standards Act and then talks about how southern timber interests have done an excellent job managing these responsibilities. Not only is this a highly selective telling that lacks details about workplace exploitation, including the tremendous dangers of the logging workplace, but there is simply no place for workers or their unions in this book. Labor practices such as not paying bonuses until after the weekend in order to ensure full crews on Monday get a nod of approval, but the authors evince no interest in anyone who lives and works in the forest except for the corporate-scientific elite.

Even less satisfying is the discussion of environmentalism. The authors are largely correct that one consequence of the National Forest Management Act of 1976, which forced the Forest Service to plan for endangered species management, was to incentivize companies to move operations from the Pacific Northwest to the South. But they significantly overplay how southern timber operators then operated with the concerns of environmentalists in mind—a particularly odd claim given the number of companies, including Georgia-Pacific (GP) and Weyerhaeuser, that had terrible reputations for their environmental management in the Northwest. When GP expanded into the Northwest, both labor unions and environmental activists expressed great concern over its notorious environmental record, but nothing about the company's environmental problems appears in this book. The authors claim that southern forestry is largely a sustainable industry, but they don't acknowledge the many critics of the environmental cost of these forestry methods. They take as scientific fact industry-funded studies—about herbicide use and the effect of even-aged forestry on species diversity—that justify present practices, while dismissing environmental critics without even analyzing their claims. For these authors, Weyerhaeuser and other companies were leaders in environmental management, engaging in groundbreaking research and leadership on mitigating forestry's impacts on wildlife. This would come as news to most students of the history of the timber industry's interactions with the environment.

Forestry in the U.S. South will be useful for future researchers on the southern timber industry for its details about corporate activities. Southern timber executives will enjoy it tremendously. Those seeking a comprehensive history of southern forests will have to look elsewhere.