Customer Reviews

The Wilderness Journeys (Canongate)

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If I was only to buy one John Muir book (a tragedy), this would be the one. Excellent essays that demonstrate both his lucid writing style and the amazing country that he describes. He coherently describes his own life (and the times that surround it), in a way that makes me want to grab a cotton rucksack and a bag of food and head off for the High Sierra.

Introduced by Graham White

FRONT COVER QUOTE
`When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe' - John Muir

BACK COVER QUOTE
`fascinating . . . the memoirs have beguiling warmth and immediacy' - Glasgow Herald

John Muir was born at Dunbar, Scotland in 1838, and emigrated to America in 1849, where he is still revered as `Father of the National Parks' and `Herald of the Conservation Movement'.

A true Renaissance man, Muir was: inventor, mountaineer, explorer, botanist, geologist, nature-writer and environmental campaigner; many would add: Christian-mystic, visionary and wilderness-sage. His writings are the fountain-head from which the American conservation movement erupted, setting the agenda, the ethos and the argument for the creation of a vast National Park system. Muir did more than simply describe the grizzly bears, the giant redwoods and luminous landscapes of California's High Sierra; as the founder of the Sierra Club, his endless campaigns saved them for all posterity.

This new selection includes Muir's finest autobiographical books: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth and My First Summer in the Sierra along with the best of his climbing and conservation essays from: The Mountains of California, Our National Parks, The Yosemite and Steep Trails.

It offers a rounded portrait of Muir as a giant of American letters; of a visionary, whose passionate defence of `everything that is Wild' , still reverberates through today's environmental movement, inspiring new generations of activists and all who love the natural world.