Philip L. Fradkin, a native of New York, the fascination the West has turned into a being capable chronicler of the history of the region and its environmental heritage books on topics such as the great San Francisco earthquake, the aftermath of nuclear tests in Nevada and survival of Colorado River, died Saturday at home in Point Reyes Station, California for 77 years.
The cause was cancer, said his son, Alex.
A Times reporter early in his career, Fradkin is the author of 13 books, including "A river no more: the Colorado River and the West" (1981), "The Seven States of California: A Natural History Human "(1995) and" Wallace Stegner and the western United States "(2008).
He has also written three books on the physical effect of the earthquake, and social policy, especially in "The great earthquake and fire storms of 1906," The New Yorker said that "begins as a history of the environment, but s' Tragedy has become a parable about the human response to disaster.
" Published in 2005, the centennial of the San Francisco earthquake was coming, has demonstrated an abuse of dynamite fire caused fires that have consumed much of the city, and human frailty exacerbated after the flames diminished.
"The path I follow is the path of politics and power," said Fradkin, who also contributed to the Library of UC Berkeley Bancroft building an archive of thousands of images and documents on the earthquake, the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005.
His book on the depletion of Colorado River remains the seminal work on the subject, according to historian Kevin Starr California, said in an interview Tuesday that Fradkin occupied "a central place in the history of the environment of the writing ", alongside such figures as Stegner, Edward Abbey and James Houston.
Prof. G. Forrest Robinson, an expert from the University of California Santa Cruz, in Western literature, Fradkin described as a literary descendant of the 19 th century explorer John Wesley Powell and Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize, two of whom wrote perspicaçment Resources natural resources and problems of the West, including those resulting from the devastation of the Colorado River.
"Fradkin career was a tribute to and through the indirect influence of Stegner Stegner Powell," said Robinson, who also has called on the book by Fradkin Stegner "easily the best album I've made life Stegner."
Fradkin was born in New York February 28, 1935, and grew up in Montclair, New Jersey when he was 14 years, the Russian Jewish father, Leon, took him on a tour of the West - through Yellowstone, Zion, the Grand Canyon, Salt Lake City, Yosemite, San Francisco, Seattle and Vancouver - that sparked his love of the region.
After graduating in political science at Williams College in Massachusetts and served in the army, went to California in 1960 and took a job as an ad salesman for a Bay Area this week. Influenced by his mother, Elvira, Vassar-educated writer and political activist, has decided to become a journalist and worked for papers in Modesto and San Rafael before the time in 1964.
Fradkin was part of the team of Times reporters and editors who won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Watts riots of 1965 and then spent a year in the Vietnam War. In 1970 he became a reporter for the newspaper environment.
He left the Times in 1975 after his editors told him their stories too tilted to the ecological point of view. Fradkin disagree and joined the administration of Governor Jerry Brown, as assistant secretary of the California Resources Agency, which helped push legislation that established the California Coastal Commission as a permanent body.
In 1976 he became editor of Audubon magazine, West, leaving in 1981, when "A River No More," was published. Loaded and walked along the Colorado River through seven states of Mexico, showing how the various requirements for irrigation, livestock, food and recreation that had been left out of the Colorado River basin that has not reached its natural outlet to the Gulf of Mexico.
Fradkin book has a theme that runs throughout his work - "the emotion, drama and sense of loss we feel in the West," said San Francisco Book Review in February.
He said his aim in writing Stegner and other environmental issues has been to illustrate the effect of the western landscape his people.
Showed, for example, as Stegner's life was formed by the failure of his father's farm. A similar connection inspired Fradkin latest book, "said Everett Streets: his short life, death, beyond the mysterious and surprising" (2011), which examines the legend of the young artist and wanderer who died in the desert Utah in 1934 at age 20.
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