Review by Choice Review
Worster calls John Muir "the greatest forerunner of modern environmentalism." Although other biographies of Muir exist, none are definitive. Worster (Univ. of Kansas) is the leading environmental historian of the American West, and his biography, A Passion for Nature, is definitive. Muir and his family immigrated to a Wisconsin farm when he was 11. His harsh, demanding father did not inhibit John from responding enthusiastically to his frontier environment. An inventive talent enabled him to go to the University of Wisconsin, where he developed interests in botany and geology. He heard about Yosemite Valley, and his lifelong urge to travel took him there in 1868. He found his home and learned how to spread his enthusiasm to others through magazine articles that made him famous. Although he loved California, he also loved traveling to Alaska and wrote about his Alaskan adventures. Muir founded the Sierra Club, and club members became allies in his efforts to preserve national parks and monuments. He did not win all his battles. Worster provides extensive notes and a good secondary bibliography, but instead of listing Muir's works, he offers Web sites that reproduce them online. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Public, professional, and academic libraries, lower-division undergraduates and above. F. N. Egerton emeritus, University of Wisconsin--Parkside
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
THE nature lover and conservationist John Muir is at once famous and indistinct in the minds of most people. Doubtless there are ardent souls who could give a credible account of his life, but not many - not even among those who share the passion that led Muir in 1867, at age 29, to embark on a thousand-mile walk from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico and drove him to continue rambling hither and yon throughout his long life. Muir is revered but remote. He needs a substantial biography to bring him into focus. Donald Worster aims to fill that gap. One of the founders of environmental history, the author of a well-received biography of the explorer and scientist John Wesley Powell and long a student of the landscape and history of the American West in particular, Worster brings superb scholarly credentials to the task. What he lacks is the ability to tell a story. Readers with a merely casual interest in Muir aren't likely to persist. But the doughty ones who stay the course will be rewarded. The record of Muir's life that Worster has scrupulously assembled, fascinating in its own right, takes on added significance as Worster sets it in context. Worster frames his narrative in a surprising way, as an exemplary tale about the rise of liberal democracy. For authority he cites Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America": "In a seldom-noticed chapter of the book, Tocqueville noted that the liberal democratic revolution seemed to encourage a strong feeling for nature. Its philosophical tendency, he wrote, is to tear down the traditional doctrines of Christianity and put in their place a new religion of nature, or what he called 'pantheism.'" What Tocqueville deplored, Worster celebrates. In his telling, Muir's passion for nature is best understood alongside a mostly gradual, if at times dramatic, shift in American society toward racial equality, equality between men and women, and the like - a shift which, in Worster's reckoning, entailed liberation from Christian orthodoxy. "Traditional Protestantism," with its emphasis on economic productivity and self-denial, "was weakening its hold, and Muir was one of those cutting away at its roots." The tale begins in Scotland, in the seaport of Dunbar, where Muir spent his first 11 years. His father, Daniel, a successful merchant, was a man of intense religious convictions who was dissatisfied with traditional denominations. Ultimately Daniel Muir was drawn to the restoration movement associated with Alexander Campbell, which claimed to return to the unspoiled beginnings of the Christian faith, free of the excrescences that had built up in the intervening centuries. In 1849, the Muir family emigrated to the United States, where the Campbellite movement began, settling in Wisconsin. Young John was expected to work hard and long, and his father was a cruel taskmaster. Many years later, in "The Story of My Boyhood and Youth" (1913), Muir recalled the frequent beatings he received, sometimes accompanied by ranting sermons. Little wonder that Muir grew up to reject his father's creed. But Muir did not settle into bitterness. On the contrary: he took an inexhaustible delight in the natural world, seeing in it the hand of a God who differed greatly from the grim deity of his father. To get a palpable sense of this delight, which was at the very core of Muir's life, it would be helpful to supplement Worster's account with another new book, NATURE'S BELOVED SON: Rediscovering John Muir's Botanical Legacy, by Bonnie J. Gisel, with images by Stephen J. Joseph (Heyday Books, $45). These extraordinary images of plant specimens Muir lovingly collected, now digitally restored and enhanced, along with writings from his notebooks and elsewhere, show how he combined exacting attention to the stubborn particularities of nature with frankly mystical rapture at its splendors. And yet, as Worster makes clear, Muir came close to setting aside this great love after he dropped out of the University of Wisconsin in the early 1860s. A rather aimless period followed until he found a job in Indianapolis at Osgood, Smith & Company, a steam-powered factory that made wooden hubs and spokes for wagon wheels. Muir excelled at the job and was soon promoted. He took an intense interest not only in the technical aspects of the factory but in questions of efficient management, going so far as to chart a typical day's labor with the aim of "harmonizing all human behavior in the factory with the rhythm of machines," as Worster writes. That John Muir, of all people, should thus anticipate the notorious "scientific management" studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor seems incredible. But Worster shrewdly observes at the outset of the book that Muir, "regardless of where he traveled, would remain a Lowland Scot all his days," and he could easily have become another dynamic industrialist in the Scottish diaspora. One day, while Muir was repairing a belt for a circular saw, a file flew into his face, temporarily blinding him. Although he healed nicely and regained his sight, the shock of the experience made a lasting impact. "Those weeks of darkness," Worster writes, "had wrought a permanent change in his thinking, and that change would gather force during the spring and ensuing summer. He would never go back to Osgood, Smith. He would throw down his tools, abandon forever any career in industry or invention, and seek his own independent way on earth." In a film or a novel, this turning point might be dismissed as heavy-handed, but real life isn't so fastidious. From this decisive moment, Muir went on to become "John Muir," lean and bearded, roaming everywhere from the Yosemite Valley to the Mojave Desert, fighting the good conservation fight (though his heart was never in politics), writing articles and books that prepared the way for the modern environmental movement. Worster reproaches his subject for backsliding: "As he aged and became more prosperous and prominent, with a national following to lead, he became more traditional in his beliefs - by no means reverting to a conservative, evangelical Christianity, but sounding more and more like a typical theist or Transcendentalist seeking beyond nature a God in heaven, a Creator of the world's material forms, or a great Spirit hovering over the earth." Worster goes so far as to attribute this alleged change in Muir's outlook to the effects of "money and fame," which "had made him more of a conformist than he seems to have realized." I see no warrant for this ungenerous judgment. Muir's mature faith was formed by the time he left Osgood, Smith - and it always contained a strong sense of divine presence. When Muir decided to leave the factory behind, he wrote, he bid "adieu to all thoughts of inventing machinery" ; instead he would spend his life "studying the inventions of God." For Muir, as Worster acknowledges, this faith wasn't threatened in the least by the ideas of Charles Darwin, whom he defended as a "devout and indefatigable seeker after truth," though Muir vigorously rejected the notion that evolution disenchanted the world, leaving us to come to terms with nature red in tooth and claw. When the Scottish mystic died, he left an estate worth the equivalent of more than $4 million today, thanks to hard work and frugality. He suffered disappointments, losses and vexations, and yet to the end possessed an unshakable assurance in the goodness of things that made him akin to Julian of Norwich : "All shall be well." After a factory accident, Muir vowed to spend the rest of his life 'studying the inventions of God.' John Muir, about 1872, top; and a drawing of Muir's student desk clock. John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It's not enough to say that John Muir was the world's leading advocate for wilderness or that he was instrumental in the creation of Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Club. Worster, who has also written a biography of John Wesley Powell, knows that to fully appreciate Muir as an inspired and influential naturalist and pacifist who wrote indelible essays articulating a pragmatic approach to conservation, one has to understand his struggle to push beyond his father's harsh evangelical Christian orthodoxy and open himself to the beauty of nature. Born in Scotland, raised in Wisconsin, Muir possessed a remarkable mechanical aptitude but was happiest wandering in the wild. Worster avidly chronicles Muir's inaugural walk from Indianapolis to Florida and his subsequent journeys around the world, but it was his ecstatic, often reckless, yet profoundly illuminating explorations of the Sierras and Alaska's glaciers that gave weight to his call to value and preserve natural resources. Worster gives equal weight to Muir's inner and outer journeys in this marvelously fluent portrait of the man who sought to establish an ethic of environmental restraint a century ago and whose powerful arguments still hold.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2008 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Environmental writer and professor Worster (Dust Bowl, Nature's Economy) presents the inspiring story of John Muir, who rebelled against orthodoxy and became one of the founders of modern environmentalism. Born in 1838 in Scotland, Muir's family emigrated to Wisconsin when he was ten. For the next 12 years, he labored on his family's farm, then left home to become a machinist and enroll in a University of Wisconsin botany course. His main interest, however, was exploring the remaining wilderness of the U.S. Finally settling in California, Muir mastered botany on his own, and by 1871 was providing the Smithsonian with regular reports of his findings. While continuing his travels, including several trips to Alaska, Muir wrote articles for local and national journals urging conservation, and was elected the first president of the Sierra Club in 1892, a position he would hold for the rest of his life. Worster's thorough, involving biography sets Muir's adventurous story against the technical and scientific culture of the day, featuring some of the period's leading thinkers and doers-including Ralph Waldo Emerson and President Theodore Roosevelt-taking on environmental issues that resonate now more than ever. (Oct.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
Review by Library Journal Review
Worster (history, Univ. of Kansas) draws on John Muir's (1838-1914) correspondence and writings to offer an enlightening biography of the influential naturalist. Born in Scotland, Muir grew up in Wisconsin, attended the university in Madison, worked in factories and sawmills, and lived in Canada during the last years of the Civil War. Later he settled in California, worked in the Yosemite region, and traveled throughout the Sierra Nevadas. Worster adroitly places Muir within the chronicles of American history and thoroughly depicts his subject's intellect and understanding of nature as well as Muir's life as a husband, father, successful farmer, writer, and world traveler. Up until his death in 1914, Muir strove diligently for the preservation of nature. Competently documented, this all-inclusive biography explains the life and times of a figure known to all who love nature and will appeal to general readers and anyone interested in the early roots of today's green movement and its founding fathers.--Patricia Ann Owens, Wabash Valley Coll., Mount Carmel, IL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
