A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir | 
 enlarge | Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
Buy New: $19.00
You Save: $15.95 (46%)
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 23420
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 544
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.7
ISBN: 0195166825
Dewey Decimal Number: 333.72092
EAN: 9780195166828
Publication Date: October 21, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing."
In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards. Yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir's passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, a self-made man of wealth and political influence. A man for whom mountaineering was "a pathway to revelation and worship."
For anyone wishing to more fully understand America's first great environmentalist, and the enormous influence he still exerts today, Donald Worster's biography offers a wealth of insight into the passionate nature of a man whose passion for nature remains unsurpassed.
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| Customer Reviews:
Wildness in His Blood December 18, 2008
doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Here, Donald Worster has delivered the most extensive and well-researched biography to date on the great conservationist John Muir. There are already several biographies on Muir available, not to mention his own partial autobiography. But here Worster digs deeply into Muir's personal correspondence, published and unpublished journals, and other period sources to place Muir in the social and political context of his times. Worster intertwines his biographical research with an engaging history of the conservation movement, Muir's complex relationship with it, and his enduring influence on it. And more than any previous biographer, Worster has conducted research into one crucial aspect of Muir's life - the evolution of Muir's religious beliefs and the integration of his complex belief system into the type of conservationist philosophy that he invented almost singlehandedly. Worster also delivers robust information on Muir's progress as a journalist and author later in life and how he pretty much invented grassroots environmentalism in his last battle - the unsuccessful fight against the Hetch Hetchy dam.
John Muir is deservedly revered for introducing his fellow Americans to the spiritual fulfillment to be found in natural beauty, as well as founding conservation as we know it today. But as expertly illustrated by Wortser herein, Muir was also a very deep thinker and spiritualist with a complex belief system built during a lifetime of outdoor sojourns and philosophical inspection. This more intricate side of his personality shines through in this biography, and Worster's book will soon be acknowledged as the definitive work on John Muir, his outdoor achievements, and his enduring philosophy of natural appreciation. [~doomsdayer520~]
Definitive Biography of Muir December 17, 2008
Scott M. Kruse (Fresno, CA USA)
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Well done. Thorough. An overview that has been long in need. A nice addition to all my other Muir books (including original first editions with dust covers). We have much to learn from Muir in his personal and public life.
wonderful biography December 11, 2008
Ken M. (NY, NY)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
This beautifully written biography tells the life story of John Muir, one of the first American environmentalists and the founder of the Sierra Club. The use of Muir's private letters and drawings makes the book come alive.
It's a perfect book for anyone interested in nature!
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