Travels in Alaska |  | Author: John Muir
Publisher: Public Domain Books
Category: eBooks
In Stock
Rating:  11 reviews
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
ASIN: B000JQUTG0
Publication Date: January 1, 2005
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Amazon.com Review
Take a trip to last century's Alaska through Muir's clean, easy-going, enthusiastic prose. He wrote the way he took pictures, with insight, attention, care and genuine feeling. It's a lovely look into a beautiful land and its inhabitants the way it used to be, told in a flowing narrative that is far less rushed than contemporary travel tales.
Product Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
 A REAL TRIP! July 20, 2001
Betty Richards (Los Angeles, CA - USA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
John Muir's diaries and stories are enchanting - and especially welcome during my long, hot drives around Los Angeles this time of year! Just hearing narrator Lee Salibury talk about the glacier formations is refreshing - and the sound effects and music add so much to the ambience! The six hours of reading seem to FLY by, and make summer traffic bearable. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Muir and Alaska February 8, 2008
Richard T. Mahoney (Sedona, AZ)
The beauty of this wonderful reprinting is how it shows John Muir as a person, how it helps us to understand the dynamic and overwhelming beauty of Alaska, and the changes in the people of Alaska. Muir's complete, tireless, and joyful commitment to nature comes through on every page. The book unintentionally provides an excellent portrait of the kind of inexhaustible devotion it takes to change the world as did Muir. The book also provides a stunning portrait of Alaska in the latter part of the 19th Century and allows one to compare the Alaska of those days with Alaska of earlier times and of today. The biggest changes are in the glaciers and in the people. The glaciers have receded dramatically as a natural part of their centuries' long retreat. It is interesting to compare what Muir saw with the experience of Vancouver almost exactly 100 years earlier (ca. 1793). Vancouver could hardly enter Glacier Bay. Muir could enter quite some distance, but the glaciers were still the dominant features. Today, the glaciers have largely receded into deep valleys. Muir encountered people in Alaska living largely as they had for centuries. They were hunters and fishermen and lived in small groups along the shore line. As Jonathan Raban points out in the intricately woven fabric of his sublime book "Passage to Juneau," the people of southeast Alaska considered the sea to be the real environment of their lives while the land was considered dangerous and unknowable. They lived along the shore and knew how to live off and with the sea year round. The lives of the Alaskan people are very different today but greatly influenced by the past. Raban often characterizes Muir's writing as overblown and florid. However, it is a portrait of a man, a maritime land and a people. To do justice to those three, the book had to be what it is - an astonishingly colorful and detailed portrait in words.
Travels With John: Better Than Ever 130 Years Later July 22, 2010
Lois-ellin Datta
Travelling Alaska with John is to see, hear, feel, taste, smell, experience the response of a God-intoxicated man to almost unearthly splendor. Muir's passions were elemental: apprehending the Divine through an understanding of nature, and hence, the protection and preservation of this voice of the sublime.
He travelled to Alaska five times over a 30 year period. This book, only completed a few years before his death, polishes the field notes of his earlier trips and offers almost unedited, his journals from the last journey. Muir's interests begin with geology, specifically how the U-shaped valleys of both Yosemite and the Alaskan fjord-land resulted from glacial actions. Beginning with ice, they include the land, the trees, the waters, the fish, the First Americans living in the harsh beautiful world, the scientists, the missionaries, transportation, food, and in a chapter that cries to be read aloud, Muir's experience of a sunrise like the eighth day of Creation and of the Northern Lights.
One remembers vignettes of one's own travels. So vivid, so immediate are these stories that they become part of your own memories. Raining is it? Experience laying your already soggy sleeping bag down in a bog so wet you strip off and shiver your way through the night, then arise---not like new-made bread---but to wring the water from your clothes and bag and slog on. Thinking of what it would be like to walk across that glacier? Start out early, accompanied by a dog who had more loyalty than brains and got over jagged ice frise-de-cheval points, across crevasses, up treacherous slopes----to get to the other side, and then come back at night, having to encourage the now-alarmed dog to leap those widening chasms, risking your own neck to get the crittur home.
Those going to Alaska could hardly have a better companion. The book is portable and a bargain. And those who travel widely through the frigates of books, like Emily, will find their world enlarged and enobled in the company of this good and brave man who did so much to preserve our wild, beautiful places.
Breath taking August 9, 2010
Chelle
I have traveled to Alaska twice, and I simply cannot get enough of the glaciers. I wanted to read this because I had heard that Muir too felt the same that I feel of the glaciers. I was NOT disappointed! His trek to seek out the glaciers reminds me very much of how I would like to seek out each and every glacier. To me climbing the face of a glacier is just a dream, a dream that you can almost live out while reading this book. I felt like I was a part of the glacier crevices or part of the ice flow. I was traveling in the canoe right along with Muir. This was the first book of his that I read, and now I am hooked!!!
Muir in southeast Alaska. September 25, 2002
Wesley L. Janssen (San Diego, CA USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
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