Operation Bite Back: Rod Coronado’s War to Save American Wilderness, by Dean Kuipers, is an exhaustive account of one man’s lifelong efforts to take animal rights activism to a new level. We learn how Rod Coronado’s passion for the great outdoors stems from childhood fishing trips, and later develops into an overzealous commitment to preservation, leading him to be referred to as one of the “fathers of animal rights.”

Under the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) campaign called Operation Bite Back, he destroys whaling ships in Iceland, targets the American fur industry, and frees hundreds of rodents from research facilities. And some of his acts, specifically those including arson,  are viewed as terrorism.

That is why the FBI, following Coronado’s actions with Earth First! and fellow activist Sea Shepherd, labeled Coronado an eco terrorist, pushing him into a deep-seated paranoia. It is interesting to see where the line is drawn between terrorism and disruption; is Coronado on par with Al Qaeda? He never technically hurts anyone, but an incendiary bomb left at one research institute comes dangerously close to killing a janitor.

The book strives for momentum in scenes of breaking and entering, escaping, and destroying. Coronado manages to bag a bunch of babes along the way and, by a stretch of imagination, there is a Bonnie & Clyde sense of outlaw romance. Mostly, though, the bulk of Coronado’s attacks just prove to be an ineffective nuisance that amount to thousands upon thousands of dollars in damages.

The most insightful sections of the book cover Coronado’s connection to Native American rituals and the time he spends in isolation, plotting his next move and choosing his counterparts in a world before the advent of cell phones. And before being picked up by the Feds, he lives on the Pascua Yaqui reservation, helping to build a kids program, which lends him a redeemable quality.

Coronado’s application of anarchism to ecology, or green anarchism, sometimes displays a great deal of élan. Yet his wiser tactics are in using video footage to expose animal researchers to the moral judgment of the public. Breezing over claims that successful vaccines require animal testing, Kuipers lionizes Coronado’s ongoing efforts to free animals held captive in research centers.

Operation Bite Back made Coronado an idol to a generation of activists. But Kuipers is a clear admirer of Coronado, often taking pains to detail his habits and practices, often to the detriment of the overall story. Do we really need to know that Coronado had an appetite for soy lattes?

In doing so, the writer leaves little room for the reader to make up his own mind or consider objectively questions posed by Coronado’s efforts: Do all living things have equal value, and is it worth risking a human’s life for an animal’s?