Rediscovering America

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