Travels in Alaska (Paperback)

by John Muir (Author), David Rains Wallace (Foreword) "AFTER eleven years of study and exploration in the Sierra Nevada of California and the mountain-ranges of the Great Basin, studying in particular their glaciers,..." (more)
Key Phrases: residual glaciers, moraine material, grand glacier, Fort Wrangell, Muir Glacier, Glacier Bay (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Take a trip to last century's Alaska through Muir's clean, easy-going, enthusiastic prose. He wrote the way he took pictures, with insight, attention, care and genuine feeling. It's a lovely look into a beautiful land and its inhabitants the way it used to be, told in a flowing narrative that is far less rushed than contemporary travel tales. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review
?Probably no other man in this country has his enthusiasm for mountains and glaciers . . . united with so rare a literary gift.??John Burroughs -- Review --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (May 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395901480
• ISBN-13: 978-0395901489
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #786,437 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Don't start your Muir education with this one, March 2, 2002

By	Corinne H. Smith (Athol, MA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

If you're new to John Muir's writings, please don't start with this one. It's a worthwhile read in its own right, don't get me wrong. But read _My First Summer in the Sierra_ or a Muir biography like Michael P. Cohen's _The Pathless Way_ before you move on to this one. Get a good dose of what the naturalist is like and learn some of his background, and then you'll be in the proper frame of mind to tackle _Travels in Alaska_. Otherwise, this book is just one glacier after another. And bless his heart, Muir wants to see them all. And climb them and explore them and sketch them and hike their entire lengths and write about them ad nauseum. He leaves his companions in his wake and puts himself squarely in the face of isolated danger over and over again. Read this book first, and you'll think he's insane. Know his roots in Wisconsin and his good work in California, and you'll be better able to appreciate what he thinks of and does in the Alaska of the late 1800s.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Muir in southeast Alaska., September 25, 2002

By	Wesley L. Janssen (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Travels in Alaska (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)

I confess up front, it's been a few years since I read Muir's Travels in Alaska. Yet significant aspects I remember well. Given Muir's exuberance for life and almost everything he encounters in his travels, one almost looses view of Muir the botanist and geologist. But not quite. Here we find the author contemplating the activity of glaciers and documenting the flora of southeast Alaska. Muir (who tended strongly toward vegetarianism) gleefully entertaining himself by foiling duck hunters. Baffling the locals by happily wandering out into major storms.
The book is a journal of Muir's 1879, 1880, and 1890 trips (he wouldn't mind if we called them adventures) to SE Alaska's glaciers, rivers, and temperate rain forests. He died while preparing this volume for publication.
I remind myself, and anyone reading this, that Muir isn't for every reader. And, as other reviewers have stated, this may not be the volume in which to introduce oneself to the one-of-a-kind John Muir. One reviewer doesn't think that Muir is entirely credible in these accounts. I won't say whether or not this is wrong, but I tend to a different view. For some of us -- and certainly for Muir -- wilderness is a medicine, a spiritual tonic, so to speak. For the individual effected in this way, physical impediments and frailties rather dissolve away when he is alone in wildness. I once heard Graham Mackintosh (author of Into a Desert Place) speak of this. In all of his travels alone in the desert, he doesn't recall having ever been sick. This may not sound credible to some, but I strongly suspect it is true.
If you like Muir's writings, read this book. If you like the stuff of Best Sellers, perhaps you should look elsewhere.

9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Don't know what to make of this, October 29, 2002

By	Michael Green "mrclay2000" (OKLAHOMA CITY, OK United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Travels in Alaska (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)

From the title, one would think this a type of travel journal, a panorama of episodes along the way, a sequence of stations between the starting off point and the destination. Instead, the overall weight of the book is given to glaciers, their descriptions, their influence on the landscape, their geological record, the discovery of new glaciers, and other characteristics of these moving rivers of ice. While Muir offers descriptive powers unequaled among authors on nature, never repeating himself though constantly repeating his subject, the sheer repetition tends to bog the work down. Two whole pages might contribute to our view of a particular glacier, and suddenly Muir reports that he's finished a 200-mile leg of his journey on foot. He tells us when he's climbed a glacier, and along the way we've missed an entire week. Time and space almost have no medium in this publication, utterly lost when gazing upon a glacier. For nature lovers who will never go to Alaska, the descriptions in this book make the ranges and glaciers come alive in print, but as a dramatic journey, a travelogue, or a field manual for the Alaskan bush, this book forms only a vague shadow.