Selected Writings of John Muir: Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams (Everyman's Library Classics Series)

This is a great book with a fairly worthless introduction. I just want to bring to the attention of Ms. Williams a grammar error in her very first sentence: "I would have loved to have met . . . ". This means essentially that at the time Muir was alive she would like to have met him before she met him. If this is too confusing, here's how the phrase should read: "I would love to have met," or "I would have loved to meet."Anyway, the introduction proceeds with a series of things Ms. Williams would love to have done with Muir, followed by quotes from the text. And there are some personal reminiscences of hers, with no really helpful further information about Muir. The chronology is helpful, but we aren't told if she compiled it, nor are we told who selected the selected writings.

Brilliant man and his way of life and thoughts are ahead of his time. I bought two, one for as a gift and the other for a great read. A must have for any nature lover's collection.

Magnificent selection. Beautiful edition.

This volume is a collection of writings by naturalist John Muir. The first “The Story of My Boyhood and Youth” is an autobiographical account of his childhood in Scotland, his life on the family farm in Wisconsin, through his early inventions and ending with his studies at the University of Wisconsin.The themes then turn to writings of the author’s travels beginning with “The Mountains of California”, “Yosemite”, two trips to Alaska and four essays concluding with a plea for protection of forests in national parks.I found the sections on life in Wisconsin (where I often vacation) to be interesting and entertaining. Muir truly sees and observes. The gems in this book are the rich descriptions of mountains and valleys, their fauna and flora, waters and glaciers. “(I)t is a handsome fern about four or five inches high, has pale-green pinnate fronds and shining bronze-colored stalks about as brittle as glass” are among the picture words Muir employs to paint on the pallet of the reader’s mind. His explanations of totem poles sparked memories of west coast museums. He relates wonderous scenes and near miss accidents, comments on the characteristics and practices of Indians and the explorers and missionaries who accompanied him.From a scientific standpoint I found his description of the actions of glaciers and their effects on the landscape to be fascinating. His ready acceptance that the melting of glaciers was a continuum of thousands of years duration from the Ice Age is in contrast to the current alarm at the continuation of this process.This tome is long, 784 pages. I noticed my mind drifting while reading so I read this in sections to help maintain my interest. If I ever travel to the areas which he chronicled I will want to reread the travelogue segments of these selections.

This collection of John Muir's writings is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in delving into Muir's thought on nature, wildness, conservation, and environmentalism. This addition to the Everyman's Library includes complete texts of his books on the Sierras, Yosemite, Alaska, his memoir of growing up in Scotland, and a healthy collection of his essays on wide ranging topics. This edition is compact in size, easy to carry (you could take it with you camping, hiking, etc., if you were inclined to bring an almost 900 page book. Muir raised his love of nature to a near religious fervor, and that sentiment is on full display in this volume. Today we can argue over exactly how much he would agree with some extreme environmentalists, but that isn't the point of this volume. Rather it makes some of his most important work available in a nice affordable edition to a wide range of people. The book looks very nice and comes with a ribbon marker sewn into the binding. An excellent starting point if you want to read the foundational works of the modern conservation movement.

The American Transcendentalist are famously a group of American thinkers, novelists, and poets who have strong ties to Ralph Waldo Emerson, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. But I've never been able to think of John Muir as evidence of the influence of the Transendentalists, but as the one major Transcendentalist who was not from New England. In some ways Muir is the culmination of Transcendentalism, solidifying the mystical views of nature that we find in Emerson with the love of wilderness we find in Thoreau. It is essential to understand that love of nature is not at all the same as the love of wilderness, as any study of the history of the attitudes of Europeans towards mountains will show. Even looking at the Colonial attitude towards wilderness as opposed to Thoreau and John Muir will demonstrate a stark difference in viewpoint. Looking at a mountain for Thoreau or Muir or for us - since for most Americans, and indeed most human beings, Thoreau and Muir have "won" on this issue - is radically different than for a colonist. A mountain for Puritan was something that was awful because unusable. The worth of any part of nature was judged by its utilitarianism. If you can't harvest land or mine it or cut it down or live on it, then what good was it? A mountain in the 17th century had no intrinsic value, but only use value. What Thoreau introduced and what Muir popularized was a way of looking at wilderness and forests and mountains beyond whatever they could be used for. Americans began looking differently at the American West after paintings by artists such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt, both of whom were deeply influenced by Emerson and Hudson River artists such as Thomas Cole, who represented the immense Western vistas as outdoor cathedrals. What is implicit in a painting by Bierstadt became explicit in the books and essays and articles by John Muir. If Thoreau remained something of an intellectual, someone for the few (that changed later, not least because of Muir), Muir hinted at the populist undertones of Transcendentalism, linking love of wilderness and nature with democratic notions. Gaining the ear of people like Theodore Roosevelt, who hiked many of Muir's beloved areas with him, many of Muir's ideas became a concrete part of the American way of life. It is close to inconceivable that a network of national and state parks could have found their way into existence without Muir. And as the founder of the Sierra Club, he found a way of his ideas to be passed down from generation to generation, even if the club has developed in ways that Muir might not have preferred.This is an exceptionally fine collection of Muir's writings. It doesn't include everything, if only because Muir wrote so much. My only complaint is that for the most part these are pretty standard texts. Except for the book on his first summer in the Sierra, these are the most frequently published and most easily obtainable of Muir's works. Still, these are some amazing books. I believe I may have gotten hooked on Muir way back in the early 1980s reading THE STORY OF MY BOYHOOD AND YOUTH, especially early on reading about having to lie in his bedroom in Wisconsin in darkness for most of a year to repair a serious eye injury. It is easy to see the birth of the man who spent his life gazing at wilderness in the young man who had to lay still doing and looking at nothing. THE MOUNTAINS OF CALIFORNIA provides a marvelous overview of how Americans perceived the state in the second half of the Nineteenth Century. It has to be kept in mind that for many Americans this text provided an introduction to a region that was for many terra incognito. If that was true for California, think how much truer it was for Alaska in his TRAVELS IN ALASKA. Of course, if there is a place with which Muir is more closely associated than any, it is the Yosemite Valley, and THE YOSEMITE provides a wonderful introduction to the part of the world that he may have loved beyond anywhere else. Just jumping back to the book about his boyhood and youth, it is fascinating to me that he had such powerful ties to Madison, Wisconsin. Of the three most important figures who wrote about American's distinctive attitudes towards wilderness - and this is a way of thinking that we have exported to the rest of the world as surely as we have exported Hollywood films or rock music - two of them, Muir and Aldo Leopold, had strong ties to Madison. The third, Thoreau, spent his life almost exclusively in New England. I hinted that there were some items that some items not easily found otherwise. These are the few essays at the end of the volume. Although this could easily be more than adequate as the only book containing the works of John Muir that one owned in a lifetime, I think the book would have been of even more value had their been more hard to find items. I love the Everyman's Library volumns that collect the work of major figures, I wish more were like their recent Edmund Burke volume, which contains both familiar and unfamiliar works. This is a fine volume, but it could have been even better.The introduction is helpful, as most Everyman intros are, but I want to add a word about the writings of the volume's editor, Terry Tempest Williams. As a Westerner who is both a woman and a Mormon, she brings a unique perspective to Western nature writing. Be sure to read her classic early book DELUGE, but I can also recommend THE OPEN SPACE OF DEMOCRACY. I'll be honest that those books aside, I've not read as much of her work as I would like. For me she has been one of those writers that I know is outstanding based upon the small amount of her work that I've been able to read. I'm very confident that many of her other books are equally fine.

Beautiful prose from a great American naturalist. What more could you want?