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Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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 (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Title to the contrary, this is better on Muir in his time than in ours. Turner does an admirable job of tracing the life of America's best-known naturalist. But he doesn't even try to explain why the white-bearded sage (remembered most for his five-year saunter in Yosemite and his struggle to preserve the area as a national park) is the only naturalist-explorer who even comes close in American lore to the likes of Boone and DeSoto, who of course had much different ideas about what should be done with the vast wildernesses of the New World. According to Turner, Muir's habit of long rambles through the landscape--first the broad folds of the Scottish Lammermuirs, later California's rugged Sierra, frozen Alaska and wild places around the world--became psychological and spiritual escapes from the thrashings of his severely disciplined boyhood in Scotland, his father's religious zealotry, the confining regimen of a Wisconsin frontier from, and the deadening routines of civilized life. Muir was a man both of his time and before his time. His thinking was influenced mostly by the Bible but increasingly by the Romantic poets in Europe, by Emerson and other American transcendentalists, as well as by the new breed of earth scientist who claimed the history of the planet could be explained by ongoing forces, not a divinely wrought or even natural catastrophe. Muir came to reject the Calvinist belief that the world was made expressly for man, writing that the universe would be ""incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes""--a belief that ultimately became the bedrock of the modern environmental movement. The kind of anti-people, anti-city bias apparent in this and much else of Muir's writing, often excused as some Scottish-Calvinist quirk, has also tinged the American conservation movement--another fascinating subject Turner fails to explore in an otherwise noteworthy biography. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
An enjoyable read. Turner covers the life of John Muir in a very evenhanded manner that does not overly emphasize any one period. Unfortunately, Turner does not make the reader feel close to the man nor does any of Muir's personal warmth or magnetism emanate from this book. Perhaps this is intentional, although the passionate appeals made by John Muir in his leadership of the Sierra Club make one wish that more of this material had been included. Very little of Muir's science is discussed, but Turner does an excellent job of tracing the social framework of Muir's life and of describing in general the nature of his works. Should be most popular with general readers who love the outdoors, but have no special training in botany, geology, or ecology.-F.F. Flint, Randolph-Macon Woman's College
Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.