WHAT'S LEFT: Reports on a Diminishing America

One of the New Yorker's longstanding men Stanley softly padding through out of the way places, sometimes in the care of members of the National Park Service. The sub-title keys the conservationist intent here and Mr. Roueche gently annotates the pleasures still to be seen or heard--birds, flowers, mighty trees. Whether it's on a towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, or a day spent on the Current River in the Ozarks, or one of the still almost uninhabited Florida keys, or the Arizona desert where everything ""sinks, stings or scratches,"" or The Big Thicket of East Texas with its threat of oil derricks, or as far as King Island in the Bering Sea 100 miles northwest of Nome. Eight pieces in all which have appeared in the above magazine. They do not have the specific drama of his Eleven Blue Men, etc., but the remote reaches and their often rare flora and fauna are seen through accurate and affectionate eyes.