Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours - Softcover

Sierra Club

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0871567040 ISBN 13: 9780871567048

Publisher: Random House, Inc., 1987

Synopsis

A biography of John Muir examines his accomplishments as an inventor, botanist, conservationist, and traveler, and attempts to depict his complex personality

About this title

From Library Journal

This latest in a spate of Muir biographies is in many ways a tour de force. It is splendidly and passionately written by Turner, who is at his best about a subject when he has visited the physical sites. For a study of the Sierra Club's founder, this meant a trip to Muir's Scottish birthplace, a dip in the boyhood swimming hole in Wisconsin, a duplication of Muir's 1867 walk from Indiana to Florida, and of course, hikes through the Sierras. The author is wonderfully lyrical in his chapters on Muir's years as a mountain man in Yosemite and sympathetically handles Muir's transformation from fundamentalist Christian to pantheist. This reviewer's only complaint is with his attempt to provide a context for Muir's life in the postbellum period. Turner's history is relentlessly Beardian, and he cheerfully dismisses recent scholarship. Nonetheless, this book belongs in most academic and public libraries. James W. Oberly, History Dept., Univ. of Wisconsin-Eau Claire
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Publishers Weekly

In this thorough, competent biography, Turner tells the story of John Muir's childhood in Scotland, his emigration to Wisconsin and education at the state university, his "thousand-mile walk" to the Gulf of Mexico and explorations of the far West, his early advocacy of forest conservation and responsibility for the establishment of national parks and wilderness areas. Muir's youthful attachment to Jeanne Carr and his life with and apart from his wife Louie are sensitively described, as are his relationships with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot; his wife's influence in turning him toward the wider world, away from his ranch and family, is sympathetically acknowledged. In his own life, Muir uniquely reconciled the conflict between democratic individualism and participatory democracy. October 25
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House, Inc.
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0871567040
• ISBN 13: 9780871567048
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 417