Milton Shedd co-founded history's most famous oceanarium, forever changing humanity's relationship to the ocean. Yet SeaWorld was far from his only achievement.

Author Conor Friedersdorf vividly recounts an adventurous childhood in 1920s California, a family trying to survive the Great Depression, a young man who snuck behind Japanese lines in World War II- where he penned love letters to his wife- a "hall-of-fame" angler in the style of Zane Grey, and an entrepreneur who shaped the golden age of amusement parks.

Friedersdorf presents the fullest-ever account of how...