John Hanson Mitchell recounts his travels by bike from Southern Spain through France and England finally ending up in Scotland all the while musing on the sun and the indelible mark it has left on our culture. The book is part travelogue, part philosophical musing, part anthropological study, part religious mediation. The accounts of the people and places he encountered are compelling and his descriptions of the food he ate along the way made me very hungry! It all adds up to a thought-provoking and entertaining read.

A couple of quibbles: It would have been great if there was a map included with the book that showed the route traveled. Mitchell writes eloquently about the geography and it's hard to visualize it without having a map handy (unless of course you are very familiar with the regions he's writing about). I also found it somewhat disturbing that it wasn't clear when exactly this journey took place. The book came out last year or the year before,but it seems that the actual trip took place long ago.

Whoever wrote that review that you say was in Publisher's Weekly obviously never read anything by John Hanson Mitchell! They must be confusing him with some other author. Mitchell's writing is always so good-hearted and generous--the opposite of caustic!
Following the Sun is so rich--a journey on two levels; a review of virtually everything under the sun, from myth to bird migration to the solar origins of Christianity. But it's also a delightful bicycle ride--all the way from the south of Spain to the Outer Hebrides in Scotland with journeys throughout the vineyards of Bordeaux, the chateaux of the Loire in France and the stone circles of the British Isles in between. Mitchell always has a way of falling in with eccebntric types, as I've seen in his other books eg. Ceremonial Time (a 15,000 year history of one square mile of land)and The Wildest Place on Earth (about Italian gardens and the American wilderness). He seems to be able to mix arcane facts about the setting of sugar in winegrapes, and the perversities of Roman emperors and the like with a sharp ear for story. There are some great ones here with some rollicking Old World characters. The author followed back roads all the way, and he did it before the establishment of the European Union when all the food was better, the wine sweeter, and the stories deeper. And Mitchell's writing style, lyrical and smooth, is a salve for whatever ails you. What a pleasure!

Mitchell created his own Walden experience on land just 16 miles away from the original site in northcentral Massachusetts. He built a cottage at the edge of his property when he and his wife separated, and so he distanced himself from the trappings of civilization at the same time. Most of them, at least. Here he relates stories from his first year at the cottage, complete with woodland encounters with wildlife, bizarre and unique individuals, and unknown shapes and spirits. He doesn't spend all his time there: he works, he travels, he investigates a local computer company. Like Thoreau, Mitchell is no hermit. And there's so much Thoreau in this volume that when you finish turning *these* pages, you might very well find yourself reaching next for _Walden_. A thought-provoking and entertaining book.

Ever since Thoreau went down to the Walden woods, writers have been going down to the woods to emulate him. "Living at the End of Time" recounts John Hanson Mitchells own shack dwelling period, and it is a very engaging account of his experiences. Particularly interesting are his accounts of his varied and eccentric neighbors, and anyone who has done a bit of construction will sympathise with his opinions on housebuilding. Its too bad this book is out of print.

John Hanson Mitchell obviously, truly loves this subject (as well as his land). He lovingly explores all parts of a small plot of land & the myriad creatures that live & interact there to create a whole ecosystem. He pulls together all the parts in a very entertaining & readable field guide to observing nature.

....is what the author shows you throughout this highly readable tale of Scratch Flat, a mile-square locale near Concord. The history of its geography, botany, and inhabitants unfolds here in lucid prose devoid of technical jargon. For the ecopsychology course I'm putting together I plan to make this book required reading.

A recommendation: the word "primitive" ought to be removed from future editions when used in reference to American Indians. Many regard it as derogatory, and even white readers may well wonder who is more primitive: those who inhabit the land with care or those who kill its inhabitants and "develop" it out of existence.

I have lifted whole lecture topics from this book, and passed on copies to numerous students and friends. The idea is lovely -write an ecology based on an intimate history of one square mile of land-and Mitchell delivers it up in excellent prose that keeps one reading even when the material turns a tad dry. Why only 4 stars? I am not sure if this book will have "legs" beyond the landscape and history that it celebrates. It would be great to have a few more Mitchells do something similar to the westward and southward, so that we could expand our perceptions beyond the deliberate confines that the author has set. For those of us within a day's drive however, this is definitely a book to read.

Mitchell goes far beyond "reading the landscape" of his town. He analyzes the history, anthropology, architecture, agriculture, geology, botany, and zoology of an area northwest of Littleton, Massachusetts, called "Scratch Flat." As if that's not enough, he goes one step further by investigating and uncovering the ancestral *spirit* of the place. This book is an easy, enlightening read that will not only have you looking differently at your own neighborhood but also contemplating our traditional notions of time. "[W]e are the future of the past, and the past of the future." (p. 200) Certainly food for thought.

Let me start by saying that I am a big fan of Mitchell, and I really enjoyed CERMONIAL TIME. This lead me to look forward to the arrival of WALKING... and at one level I was not disappointed. AS in all his work Mitchell is adept at weaving together diverse strands of history, culture, and place and to get us thinking about the landscape in new ways. His taste in friends (or at least his way of introducing us to his friends) however seems somewhat flawed. While his other books are more solitary ruminations on ideas and areas, in WALKING he brings along two annoying Yuppies, who would serve as comic relief if any was needed. One is an incredibly PC Indian Wannabe, the other is the sort of Birder that gets some of us reaching for the shotgun, between them they serve only to distract the reader from what would otherwise be a pleasant cross-country ramble through a landscape made all the more interesting by Mitchell's knowledge of both recent history and geological "deep time". Overall Mitchell is at his best when he talks about the dead or the non-human, he can be downright cruel in his descriptions of the living people that he encounters as he approaches Concord. For all that I can sympathize with Mitchell's obvious concern for the rampant development that he must deal with I am not sure that this sort of meaness towards folks who may well be Fellow Travellers (in several senses of the word) does the story much good. In spite of my criticism this is probably a stroll worth taking though you may want to stuff two of your companions into a cedar swamp!

These 300 pages describe both a physical journey, lasting but a day, overlaid with historical, architectural, artistic, anthropological, and literary musings of a richly cultivated mind. He writes, for example, upon viewing a stark landscape, "...I made the connection...This hollow...looks very much like the fourteenth-century Tuscan forest as envisioned by nineteenth-century French illustrator Gustave Dore."

Making connections is Mitchell's forte. The narrative of a tramp through woods and sloughs brings to Mitchell's fertile imagination scenes enacted in the places they pass. He seamlessly inter-weaves the fascinating story of King Philip's War, described as "one of the first anti-imperialist efforts ... the first American revolution" alongside the war between the colonists and British regulars, "essentially a civil war."

Rather than re-hash Thoreau's meditations in "Walden," Mitchell shares his own stream-of-consciousness, touching on "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and "The Wizard of Oz," "The Inferno" and some of Melville's "chief harpooners." Additionally, he offers an in-depth account of the way that nineteenth-century landscape painters changed the view of society toward their environment, suggesting that "It is doubtful that the preservation of a wilderness park would even have been considered if the painters hadn't been there first." Indeed, his descriptions are painterly, but he also succeeds in carefully bringing his companions and those they meet on the way to believable life.

The book is divided into 18 chapters, fifteen of them given names of places traversed in each of the miles walked. These names, such as "Nonset Brook" and "Nagog" are less likely to register with the reader than the connections these places evoke in the mind of the author. Who can recall, for instance, that the etymology of "Key West" is to be found in "Mile 10: Thoreau Country?" Hopefully, an index in a later edition will make it easier for the reader to re-discover favorite passages.

The readers join Mitchell and his friends as they walk through an historical and artistic region of our nation. We discuss the history, nature, the people and the sights as we meet others along the walk. We walk along with Thoreau as well as Mitchell's fascinating friends. There are few books that I've enjoyed as much as this friendly hike. Mitchell is one of best of the current nature writers because he becomes a participant with the reader in enjoying nature and history.

This book is a pilgrimage. Not a linear pilgrimage that sets off from a given point and progresses towards a distant goal, but a pilgrimage through a labyrinth or maze - a circular pilgrimage, if you will.

The writer, a naturalist with a home and garden in eastern Massachusetts, is at home also in the wilderness of the western United States as well as in thr historic gardens of Italy. He traces for the reader the influence that the great gardens of Italy, part cultivated, part bosky wilderness, have had on the development of both the gardens and the wilderness of the U.S. But the book is not so simple and direct. Through it runs the theme of the labyrinth, its symbolism of the complexities of nature, its paradoxes, twists and turns.

The true spirit of wildness is seldom to be found, the writer says, in our large "wilderness" parks polluted by ATV's, rangers and over-run camp sites. Human connection with the land is most strongly felt in our gardens - not the front yard with its neatly mowed lawn and well-pruned foundation planting but a truly creative garden with wild spaces and vistas that welcome wild creatures. We can save some land from developers, build small parks, add in gardens with their boskyness (lovely word, that) and create our own web of wilderness even in our most built up areas,

Did the nature god Pan die with the birth of Christianity and the idea of dominion over all the creatures of the earth? The writer is optimistic that he did not and that the true spirit of nature can be revived, one natural garden space at a time.

This is the work of a respected nature writer who is stringing together ideas about wilderness and gardens loosely and creatively. It is both evocative and provocative, a mental ramble for an open and enquiring mind.

Like a ramble through a garden, or through the twists and turns of a maze, Mitchell takes the reader on a casually structured walk through memory, opinion, and speculation. He jumps from topic to topic in an engaging manner without exploring in any great depth his subjects -- the history of gardening in Italy and America, a few favorite writers (Thoreau, Wharton), his own large garden, his personal history, encounters with interesting people, the American conception and use of wilderness, urban encroachment, mazes and monsters, some colorful myths and stories. Nor does he need to go deep. His attempt in these related essays seems to be to introduce the reader to a great variety of ways of thinking about gardens, to provide different pathways through the subject, different perspectives. And he succeeds. Despite his overly ambitious subtitle ("Italian Gardens and the Invention of the Wilderness"), which suggests a strong unifying theme that the book is not disciplined enough to provide, he continually evokes the beauty and mystery of gardens as places of internal as well as external discovery. Constantly on the lookout for an iconic, sexless Pan, Mitchell finds the demigod in humans, goats, decorative statues, the center of a maze, and, ultimately, in the enduring metaphor that survived the arrival of Christianity not just to exist on its own, but also to inform the imagery of Satan. There are several startling moments as he gently guides us on his personal journey, such as the fact that in the 1960s scientists discovered lead from auto exhaust embedded in Arctic ice, or his encounters with an unnerving hiker in one of our national parks. Throughout, Mitchell's abiding faith in the garden, in the importance of human contact with the earth, sustains the book's meditative and thoughtful tone.

John Hanson Mitchell has spent the past two decades prowling a square mile or so of suburban woods and fields in Eastern Massachusetts, searching for its past and speculating on its future, and in the process producing 4 books (Ceremonial Time, Living At the End of Time, Walking Toward Walden, and Trespassing) dealing with the nature of place and its affect on the people who live there. His latest book, The Wildest Place on Earth, may at first glance seem, if not exactly a detour, at least a stroll down a side street, away from his favorite square mile of land known as Scratch Flat, but read on and you will find that Mitchell is once again exploring in small spaces.

In The Wildest Place on Earth, Mitchell sets out to discover the nature of the American wilderness and the influence of Italy's tamed landscapes on the American experience. In a series of rambles that span decades and move effortlessly from the history of Renaissance gardens to American conservationists, and the Hudson River school of landscape painters to encounters in America's overcrowded and over-loved wilderness parks, Mitchell pokes and prods and writes of the past. This book is part travelogue, and part informed speculation as Mitchell comes to realize that wilderness is perhaps more a concept than a true reality for most of us, and that the wildest place on earth may be his own somewhat haphazardly planned backyard garden that has grown over the past decade into a lush and relaxing presence.

Mitchell writes much in this book about the Greek and Roman myths and how they influence, even to this day, what we see and feel as wilderness. The god Pan is always present, and the history of mazes and labyrinths makes for some fascinating side trips through Italy. If you are looking for a few good modern-day gardening stories, he supplies those as well.

The editor of the Massachusetts Audubon magazine Sanctuary and the winner of the 1994 John Burroughs essay award and the 2000 New England Bookseller's Award, Mitchell is a graceful stylist who will win you over as he rambles an speculates'much like a close friend who you may not always agree with, but you can't stop listening to those provocative opinions.

Oh, western man! When will you learn your lesson? People vehemntly guard their private property. One would think that after looking at my continent, and looking and the failed socialist experiments of the twentieth century, Americans would learn the lesson of the importance of private ownership. If elimination of private property is what you Americans want, then you too will be condemned to poverty and death.

This book passed a basic test of polemical writing: it inspired me to go out and do what the author strongly suggested the reader do. It was the middle of the night, but I put the book down and went out for a walk in the woods on someone else's property (don't worry they have plenty) so that I could look at the moon and stars and sparkling landscape from a high place.

I learned an awful lot about the history of private property from this book. Because the concept of private property is so central to American identity I was left wondering why someone had not presented an environmental history from this perspective before. It is has given me a lens through which to read other books of environmental history.

Mitchell is honest about where he stands in the debate about who should be in charge about what should be done with private land. He is an ecocentrist, pure and simple, and doesn't trust individual landowners to "do the right thing" by their land. He allows that one of the chief antagonists in this book, a man named Morrison, actually does take good care of his land, but he makes it clear that he does not want to leave such a precious thing as the land to the chance that the owner may or may not take care of it. In fact, much of the book is an attempt to show us how absurd and artificial the idea of "land ownership" really is.

One of the threads in the story is Mitchell's recounting of an attempt at group ownership ("co-ownership") of land. The community that is finally realized falls short of its ideal, but he insists that it is far better than the default condition in modern America. Decide for yourself whether it is a pyrrhic victory.

The main thread of the book is the tribal history of his favorite plot of land in Littleton, Mass. As usual, it is a pretty sad story.

John Hanson Mitchell is a graceful stylist who has been hammering away at a host of environmental subjects from the perspective of a single square mile. Trespassing may be his best book yet, and only slightly less ambitious than his monumental tour de force, Ceremonial Time. He takes the theme of ownership of land, one of the most potentially boring subjects around, and turns it into a great nonstop read by focussing on a single five hundred acre tract of land through some three hundred years of history. Some of the characters in this book are right out of Dickens, some of the descriptions of the landscape are out of Conrad, and, as far as I can tell, he's got a great understanding of the whole process of the creation of the American laws that govern the use of land. But you don't have to be interested in environment or legal history to enjoy this. Just read it for the characters. I wept for Sarah Dublet at the end of this book.