Review by New York Times Review
MANY OF US go camping with the expectation of rapturous communion with nature or, if that fails, the prospect of returning safely to civilization with a disaster story worth bragging about. Dan White, the author of "Under the Stars: How America Fell in Love With Camping," is no different. On Page 10, he whacks his head hard (on a box containing a copy of "Walden," no less). Before the book ends, he will have been swarmed by wasps while camping naked, attacked by a crane at a high-end "glamping" safari park and seen his car set upon by marmots along a remote mountain road. Despite being knocked around, White - the author of a previous memoir about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, who estimates he has spent 600 nights of his life camping - still manages to deliver a chatty and entertaining history of self-conscious American attempts to set off into the wild, along with digressions on topics including backpack design, s'mores, 19th-century nervous illnesses, wilderness toilets and the charms of retro camping gear. (Gibcroke, wambec, wangan stick or kekauviscou saster, anyone?) "I love camping. I hate camping. I can't seem to stop," he writes at the start, setting the tone. "I like to think that Leonard Cohen was talking about camping when he said that everything is cracked but that's how the light gets in." White's early chapters stick close to a great-man approach to the history of camping. We get portraits of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Ernest Thompson Seton, a founder of the Boy Scouts, as well as of less familiar figures like Horace Kephart, a librarian turned author of the classic manual "Camping and Woodcraft," and the Merry Tramps of Oakland, a bohemian women's camping club formed in California in the 1880s. (Wherever possible, White does try to remember the ladies.) All along the way, he finds a tension between the democratic and elitist approaches to camping. When William H.H. Murray, a Boston preacher turned Adirondack wilderness guru, published his 1869 best seller "Adventures in the Wilderness," he was assailed by aristocratic hunters for bringing "a bunch of carpetbaggers" into the woods, White writes. Newspapers ran articles mocking the hapless mobs who soon found themselves lost and shivering in the woods as "Murray's Fools." White, a resolute camping democrat, credits Murray with being among the first to encourage women and children to venture into the woods, but faults him for downplaying "the chaos hard-wired into almost any camping experience." "Those campers sought bliss and an uncomplicated escape from their messy lives," he writes. "What they found was the actual Adirondacks: steep, soggy and unforgiving." White doesn't shrink from the actual, interspersing his historical narrative with first-person camping adventures, not all of which, alas, are especially eventful. To his credit, he devotes a chapter to "the blinding whiteness of camping." (The estimated 50 million Americans who go camping each year are overwhelmingly Caucasian.) But his account of tagging along with a group of African-American and Latino campers in the Everglades mainly demonstrates that he's awkward around teenage girls. At other times, White's stuntish approach - he vows at the outset that he won't "write about any period of camping history without living through it as much as possible" himself - comes off as a little narratively desperate. It's good to know about Joe Knowles, an early-20th-century huckster whose naked camping exploits made him a national celebrity. But what do we really learn from White's own nude camping trip, beyond the fact that wearing a deerhide loincloth and sleeping with nothing between you and a mound-like "debris shelter" aren't very comfortable? A chapter about hiking Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the Lower 48, with a homemade poop-collection tube he calls the Immaculator, on the other hand, is gonzo comedy aimed at a serious point. White arrives as a self-styled "minimal-impact warrior" and "turd nanny" bent on cleaning up after hikers who have flouted the rigorous pack-it-out rule. But halfway up, the Immaculator is full. It's not easy, a ranger tells him solemnly, to create "an ethic of strong responsibility for up-close fecal disposal" among the growing crowds on the mountain. Many of the great campers, starting with Thoreau, have needed "something to camp against," White writes. For us less gnarly sorts, the urge to sleep in the woods is often rooted in softer-edged nostalgia- for a less crowded world, a simpler time, our own childhood. In his epilogue, White drops the antic humor and offers a sweet meditation on the intergenerational experience of camping, in its mundane, generally undram atic glory. "What can you do?" his young daughter says, squirting Smucker's strawberry spread directly into her mouth after they've run out of other food during their first family backpacking trip. "This is camping." THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE may owe White a debt of gratitude for "turd nanny." But in "Landmarks," the British nature writer Robert Macfarlane takes a more high-minded approach to the vocabulary of the natural world. The book gathers some 2,500 endangered words used to describe natural features of the British Isles, offered in hopes that they might "re-wild" the language and help counter the forces of "capital, apathy and urbanization" that have turned so much of our landscape into a "blandscape." Not that Macfarlane entirely neglects the lower functions. "Before beginning this work," he writes, "I would not have guessed at the existence of quite so many terms for animal dung, from crottle (a foresters' term for hare excrement) to doofers" (Scots for horse manure) "to the expressive ujller (Shetlandic for the unctuous filth that runs from a dunghill) and turdstool (West Country for a very substantial cowpat)." And how on earth do any of us five without kimmeridge, a coinage for "the light breeze which blows through your armpit hair when you are stretched out sunbathing"? Macfarlane's glossaries - which are grouped under headings like "Fiatlands," "Waterlands," "Underlands" and so on - come from his years of wide-ranging reading and conversation. The result is a beguiling book, and also a very British one - if that isn't too broad a term for a work drawing on Old English, Norn, Anglo-Romani, Cornish, Welsh, Gaelic and the Orcadian, Shetlandic and Doric dialects of Scots. It might be hard to imagine where, outside a Scrabble game, an American might drop gofer (Welsh for overflow from a well) and smeuse (Sussex dialect for the gap in a hedge left by the regular passage of a small animal). But who can resist the "tinkling poem" of aquabob, clinkerbell, cancervell, ickle, tankle, shuckle and other terms for icicle? Alternating with the word lists are fine essays on nature writers who have been Macfarlane's companions on a lifetime of literal and literary walking. (Admirers of Helen Macdonald's "H Is for Hawk" may be tempted by J.A. Baker's "The Peregrine," described as "not a book about watching a falcon but a book about becoming a falcon" and, perhaps less appealingly, as "a book in which little happens, hundreds of times.") But for many readers, the wonderfully exotic words will be the thing, even if Macfarlane admits they are sometimes superfluous. "Language is always late for its subject," he writes. "Sometimes on the top of a mountain I just say, 'Wow.'" Many great campers, starting with Thoreau, have needled 'something to camp against.' JENNIFER SCHUESSLER is a culture reporter for The Times.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
American camping, once known as woodcraft, got its first big boost in popularity in 1869, when thousands swarmed the Adirondacks, seeking a cure for neurasthenia, a vague lack of vigor. White (The Cactus Eaters, 2008) investigates the history and current practices of camping all across the country in a free-roaming expedition that includes a look at the founding of the Boy Scouts, and how roadside camping evolved from sheer necessity Model Ts broke down a lot to leisurely trips in ever-larger and more elaborate RVs and campsites of varying degrees of comfort. White joins an Everglades trip meant to connect minority kids to nature, and reflects on antebellum African Americans who lived on the land, including thousands who survived hardships by virtue of their outdoor skills. Backpacking may have exploded in the 1970s, but its roots lie in the 1935 invention of nylon. White also ventures into the leave-no-trace approach to camping. An adventurous, informative, and irreverent look at outdoor recreation.--Carr, Dane Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Mixing history and firsthand account, White (The Cactus Eaters) traces the evolution and various iterations of recreational camping in the U.S. He begins, unsurprisingly, with Henry David Thoreau, the "father of the backyard campout." From there, White undertakes his own adventures recreate camping history. He hires a wilderness guide and camps in the Adirondacks, a popular approach for 19th-century Romantic campers. He undertakes a "naked survival campout" to get a taste of the experience of Joe Knowles, who in 1913 entered the Maine woods with nothing and lived for two months simply for the challenge. The writing is light and humorous even as White explores social and cultural issues surrounding camping: the roots and implications of the "ethnicity gap" in camping and outdoor activities; the initial exclusion of women from the outdoors, and the women who pushed against those barriers, using the outdoors to "make a political statement." The history is engaging, featuring familiar and unknown characters, and White does justice to camping in all its forms, including woodcraft, leave-no-trace backpacking, car camping, glamping, and RVing. The book does not purport to be a comprehensive history. Rather, it is a quite enjoyable stroll through the past, led by a talented writer who clearly appreciates the benefits of getting outside. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
White (The Cactus Eaters) weaves personal vignettes and history to describe the appeal of camping in America; how it took hold and evolved. While not an exhaustive history, the book is entertaining and considers the influence of such figures as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Theodore Roosevelt. The author's -geographical forays include the Adirondacks, the Everglades, and the Sierras. White explores the history of the Boy Scouts, the advent of Leave No Trace camping, the phenomenon of "glamping," and the growing predominance of RVs. In the vein of Bill Bryson, White's own mishaps and wry humor keep the prose fresh and engaging. He addresses issues such as the lack of diversity in the average national park campground, the accessibility vs. preservation of wild places, and the importance of spending time outdoors as a spiritual pursuit in an increasingly cloistered and technologically dependent world. While White offers few solutions to some of the topics he discusses, such as sustainability, this is a worthwhile history of what seems a singularly American way of interacting with the natural world. VERDICT In an era when visits to national parks have grown exponentially, this book is an excellent and timely choice for readers.-Barrie Olmstead, Sacramento P.L © Copyright 2016. 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.
