The Wilderness Journeys The Story of My Boyhood and Youth: A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf: My First Summer in the Sierra: Travels in Alaska: Stickeen
- 23 Feb 1998
- 9780862415860
- £18
- 672 pp
- 130×195mm
In a few words
John Muir lived, as he put it, ‘in an infinite storm of beauty.’ ‘No other writer is so ceaselessly astonished by the natural world, or communicates that astonishment more urgently., (Robert Macfarlane)
It was after reading John Muir that I fell under his spell. The quality of the man...came out in his writing.
Elisabeth Inglis
Scotsman WeekendIt is fascinating...the memoirs have beguiling warmth and immediacy.
More about
the book
The name of John Muir has come to stand for the protection of wild land and wilderness in both America and Britain. Born in Dunbar in the east of Scotland in 1838, Muir is famed as the father of American conservation, and as the first person to promote the idea of National Parks.
Combining acute observation with a sense of inner discovery, Muir’s writings of his travels through some of the greatest landscapes on Earth, including the Carolinas, Florida, Alaska and those lands which were to become the great National Parks of Yosemite and the Sierra Valley, raise an awareness of nature to a spiritual dimension. These journals provide a unique marriage of scientific survey of natural history with lyrical and often amusing anecdotes, retaining a freshness, intensity and brutal honesty which will amaze the modern reader.
This collection, including the never-before-published Stickeen, presents the finest of Muir’s writings, and imparts a rounded portrait of a man whose generosity, passion, discipline and vision are an inspiration to this day.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe