Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks (Crown Journeys) - Hardcover

McKibben, Bill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0609610732 ISBN 13: 9780609610732

Publisher: Crown, 2005

Synopsis

The acclaimed author of The End of Nature takes a three-week walk from his current home in Vermont to his former home in the Adirondacks and reflects on the deep hope he finds in the two landscapes.

Bill McKibben begins his journey atop Vermont’s Mt. Abraham, with a stunning view to the west that introduces us to the broad Champlain Valley of Vermont, the expanse of Lake Champlain, and behind it the towering wall of the Adirondacks. “In my experience,” McKibben tells us, “the world contains no finer blend of soil and rock and water and forest than that found in this scene laid out before me—a few just as fine, perhaps, but none finer. And no place where the essential human skills—cooperation, husbandry, restraint—offer more possibility for competent and graceful inhabitation, for working out the answers that the planet is posing in this age of ecological pinch and social fray.”

The region he traverses offers a fine contrast between diverse forms of human habitation and pure wilderness. On the Vermont side, he visits with old friends who are trying to sustain traditional ways of living on the land and to invent new ones, from wineries to biodiesel. After crossing the lake in a rowboat, he backpacks south for ten days through the vast Adirondack woods. As he walks, he contemplates the questions that he first began to raise in his groundbreaking meditation on climate change, The End of Nature: What constitutes the natural? How much human intervention can a place stand before it loses its essence? What does it mean for a place to be truly wild?

Wandering Home is a wise and hopeful book that enables us to better understand these questions and our place in the natural world. It also represents some of the best nature writing McKibben has ever done.

About this title

About the Author

Bill McKibben is the author of, most recently, Enough and is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and the New York Times. A scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, he lives with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter in the mountains above Lake Champlain in Ripton, Vermont. Their house in the Adirondacks is in Johnsburg, New York.

From AudioFile

Bill McKibben is a nature writer who doesn't dwell on the ecological and biological minutia of plants and animals. For him, a walk through the woods is simply a chance to enjoy nature, even if he doesn't always remember which plant is which and the scientific names of birds. That sense of joy is reflected in his writing. This book chronicles a three-week walk from his current home in Vermont to his former home in the Adirondacks. Along the way, he talks about the natural world, man's influence on that world, and the potential path for both to follow. He describes encounters with dozens of interesting people, giving the book the feel of a good travelogue. Michael Prichard's crisp, clear diction is easy to understand. He varies the pacing effectively and uses pauses dramatically to enhance the author's points. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0609610732
• ISBN 13: 9780609610732
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 160