Books Needed in Every Family Library: Complete National Parks of the United States

Complete National Parks of the United States by Mel White, National Geographic, Washington, D.C., 2009.

Every home needs to have a book that details the National parks.  We keep our copy in the family room where we can be referred to readily.  It is a resource when we are planning summer vacations.  

This is a reference book, a collection of not only the national parks, but also the monuments, historic sites, memorials, seashores etc.  The subtitle says, "Featuring 400+ Parks, Monuments, Battlefields, Historic Sites, Trails, Recreation Areas, and Seashores.   For us it replaces the National Park from Grolier Book, which had become dated, and then moldy.  However it was a larger size, and consequently had larger and better pictures.  That book only featured the National Parks.  This includes much more.
This book is organized into regions.  Each regions is about four or five states.  So to find the park you want, you have to first find the region it is in, and then look further from there.  There is no index to make searching quicker.  The pictures are generally good, but usually small.  There are some two-page pictures which are very nice.  This book only gives an overview of the parks.  After finding the park you want to visit, more research would be needed.  However it is good to spark an interest in a particular area.