#64
Title: The 8 Wilderness Discovery Books
Author: John Muir
Genre: Autobiography
Challenges: 100+, Read and Review, Pages Read, Book-a-Week, Seconds, Fill in the Gaps, Read Your Own Book, Fall into Reading
Rating: B+
Published: 1992
Dates read: 9/14/09 - 10/22/09
Number of pages: 193 of 1030
From the inside flap - “The name John Muir (1838-1914) has come to stand for the protection of wilderness and wild land in both America and Britain. A prolific writer and polemicist, he published eight influential books which are collected here for the first time in omnibus form. All immensely readable, they represent a lifetime’s relationship with landscape from an inspirational architect of the modern conservation movement.
“Those who care about the future of the earth have been turning back to the writings of Muir to rediscover a passion, discipline and vision that are so important now as they were nearly a century ago. Muir was the person to promote the idea of National Parks and was also the founder of the hugely successful conservation organization, the Sierra Club. His ideas and observations continue to contribute important guidelines to the current debate on conservation matters. Yet readers new to Muir’s style will be amazed by the freshness, detail and intensity of these remarkable records of his frugal wanderings through the wildernesses of America. Six of the books included here are published for the first time in Britain and all have been arranged in their natural order (in terms of Muir’s life) even though the books about his youthful explorations were originally published many years after his seminal works on Yosemite and the Sierra.
“Born in Dunbar, Scotland, Muir began his ‘rock-scrambling’ on the walls of Dunbar Castle. When he was eleven, the Muir family emigrated to the American Mid-West where Muir developed his talent as a young naturalist. After a period as a student at the University of Wisconsin, he set out for the ‘The University of the Wilderness’.
“The Story of my Boyhood and Youth (1913) is a brutally honest memoir of Muir’s early life under a stern father both in Dunbar and Wisconsin. It contains the enthusiastic memories of a boy coming to terms with life on a pioneering farmstead. In the same vein
A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916) described Muir’s first major journey across America.
“Muir’s classic journal,
My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), contains the famous visionary anticipation about ecology: ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe’. Muir’s first book,
The Mountains of California (1894), displays his skill in marrying scientific survey of natural history with personal experiences, anecdotal, even lyrical in their awe for the wonders of the natural world.
“In
Our National Parks (1901) Muir presents his evidence and his philosophy for the protection of wilderness areas. He vividly describes the birds and animals, the waterfalls and forests of four US National Parks while observing that: ‘Thousands of tired nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of lumber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.’
“Muir’s idea of writing a guidebook was to inspire ordinary people to visit and then want to protect what they saw.
The Yosemite (1912) ends with a fighting chapter on the need to preserve the Hetch Hetchy Valley from flooding. It was a battle which Muir lost, and his life ended in bitter disappointment.”
I friend gave this book to me as a retirement gift because he loved the outdoors and wanted me to appreciate God’s gift of being able to see the beauty of our surroundings and enjoy Mother Nature at her fullest.
