Travels in Alaska, by John Muir, reflects Muir’s exuberance for life and almost everything he encountered in his many travels. In addition to being an ecologist and traveler, John Muir was a botanist and geologist, a fact which readers will be reminded of through his contemplations of the southeast Africa flora and the activity of glaciers.”Travels in Alaska” is John Muir’s journal of his 1879, 1880, and 1890 trips to southeast Alaska’s glaciers, rivers, and temperate rain forests. For Muir, the wilderness was a medicine or spiritual tonic. Physical impediments and frailties faded into the background when he was alone in the wilderness. Much of “Travels in Alaska” is given to glaciers, including their descriptions, their influence on the landscape, their geological record, the discovery of new glaciers, and other characteristics of these moving rivers of ice. When describing glaciers, John Muir offers descriptive powers unequaled among authors on nature, Time and space almost have no medium in this publication, utterly lost when gazing upon a glacier. If you are looking for a dramatic journey, a travelogue, or a field manual for the Alaskan bush, this book may not be for you. But if you are a nature lover who wants the ranges and glaciers of Alaska to come alive in print, read John Muir’s “Travels in Alaska.” This was John Muir’s last book-he died while preparing it for publication.
Book Info:
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* Books Details:
- Sales Rank: #3632436 in Books
- Published on: 2011-07-26
- Original language:
English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .37″ h x
6.00″ w x
9.00″ l,
.52 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 172 pages
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- Sales Rank: #3632436 in Books
- Published on: 2011-07-26
- Original language:
English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .37″ h x
6.00″ w x
9.00″ l,
.52 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 172 pages
Travels in Alaska, by John Muir, reflects Muir’s exuberance for life and almost everything he encountered in his many travels. In addition to being an ecologist and traveler, John Muir was a botanist and geologist, a fact which readers will be reminded of through his contemplations of the southeast Africa flora and the activity of glaciers.”Travels in Alaska” is John Muir’s journal of his 1879, 1880, and 1890 trips to southeast Alaska’s glaciers, rivers, and temperate rain forests. For Muir, the wilderness was a medicine or spiritual tonic. Physical impediments and frailties faded into the background when he was alone in the wilderness. Much of “Travels in Alaska” is given to glaciers, including their descriptions, their influence on the landscape, their geological record, the discovery of new glaciers, and other characteristics of these moving rivers of ice. When describing glaciers, John Muir offers descriptive powers unequaled among authors on nature, Time and space almost have no medium in this publication, utterly lost when gazing upon a glacier. If you are looking for a dramatic journey, a travelogue, or a field manual for the Alaskan bush, this book may not be for you. But if you are a nature lover who wants the ranges and glaciers of Alaska to come alive in print, read John Muir’s “Travels in Alaska.” This was John Muir’s last book-he died while preparing it for publication.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
43 of 44 people found the following review helpful.
Don’t start your Muir education with this one
By Corinne H. Smith
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.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Muir in southeast Alaska.
By Wesley L. Janssen
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.
18 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Don’t know what to make of this
By Michael Green
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.
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