"Stradling has given us an entirely new understanding of the complex interrelations of the urban and rural landscape. This is an excellent history."
Environmental History
"Making Mountains is perhaps the best example yet of a small but growing literature that links urban, suburban, and rural space into a synthetic narrative of social and environmental change. Stradling neither dismisses rurality as a static and homogenous placeholder irrelevant until colonized by the suburbs nor privileges simplistic ideals, whether of wilderness or bucolic agrarianism, that do not reflect the complexity of life beyond the metropolis.. [A]n outstanding work of environmental and urban history that should remind scholars that despite the apparent distance between the two, the city and the country share a common history and a common future."
H-Net
"The main strength of this sophisticated book lies in Stradling's moving beyond stating the Catskills' importance in forming American ideals of the countryside and wilderness or describing its role in the early conservationist movement. His most sweeping conclusion holds that scholars' traditional 'imperial model,' emphasizing the dominant role of urban elites in transforming the environment, tells an incomplete story. In the Catskills, urban tourists, weekenders, and natives whose families named the landscapes together shaped— and shape— the region."
The Journal of American History
"Making Mountains [is] an engaging read [in] its focus on and exploration of the bridgeable chasm between the country and the city, the rural and the urban, the metropolis and the mountain chain, places of change and places of assumed stasis. . . . Making Mountains will be insightful for all scholars working on the friction and contentious contact zones and conditions that emerge when rural and urban realities and their cultural producers and discourses are brought into play."
Electronic Green Journal
"Making Mountains is a meticulously researched and intellectually focused piece of scholarship, but— clearly written, engaging, and full of telling anecdote— it is also designed to reach a wide audience."
New York History