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My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir
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My First Summer in the Sierra

by John Muir

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184332,094 (3.98)5
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Muir's prose is ecstatic: but it is also aware, accurate, and detailed. Page after page records observations of botany, geology, the climate. And while Muir is alone much of the time his notes on the personalities he meets — Portuguese, Indian, tourists; and also squirrels, houseflies, bear, not to mention the tedious sheep — enliven the book and bring his ecstasy back to earth.
http://cshere.blogspot.com/2008/12/wh...
  pieterpad | Jan 1, 2009 |
This is an incredible book. Not because he is a great writer but because the Sierra are incredible. It is great how he describes areas that you can go to today that are very little changed, and some areas that are changed you can read about the way they used to be. I enjoyed his eye for the botanical treasures as well. "Hooved locusts.." awesome!
  tkraft | Feb 12, 2008 |
When Muir first arrived in CA in 1869, and got a summer job herding sheep to the highlands of the Sierra mountains. There he would discover his life's passion, Yosemite and the Sierra Mountains. This journal details with excitement and awe the bounty of nature, and the colorful backwoods characters he encountered.

Available on Internet Archive, first edition, illustrated:
http://www.archive.org/details/myfirs... ( )
  Stbalbach | Jun 6, 2007 |
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In the great Central Valley of California there are only two seasons, -- spring and summer.
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Wikipedia in English (1)

List of books about the Sierra Nevada (U.S.)

Book description

Amazon.com (ISBN 0140255702, Paperback)

John Muir, a young Scottish immigrant, had not yet become the famed conservationist whom he liked to call "John o' the Mountains" when he first trekked into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada not long after the end of the Civil War. Having caught a glimpse of such magical places as Tuolumne Meadows and El Capitan, Muir ached to return, and in the summer of 1869 he signed on with a crew of shepherds and drove a flock of 2,500 woolly critters toward the headwaters of the Merced River.

The diary he kept while tending sheep forms the heart of My First Summer in the Sierra; published in 1911, it enticed thousands of Americans to visit the Yosemite country. The book is full of the concerns Muir would later voice as America's foremost preservationist and wildlands advocate, which would bear fruit in the creation of several national parks and monuments. And it resounds with Muir's nearly pantheistic regard for the natural world: with celebrations of the Sierra's lizards that "dart about on the hot rocks, swift as dragonflies," its mountain lions and tall trees and fierce thunderstorms and bears; with Muir's overarching awe for places that civilization had yet to tame. Though perhaps a little purple by modern standards, Muir's book continues to inspire readers to seek out such places for themselves and make them their own--and as such it stands among the enduring classics of environmental literature. --Gregory McNamee

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:24 -0400)

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