From the title, one would think this a type of travel journal, a panorama of episodes along the way, a sequence of stations between the starting off point and the destination. Instead, the overall weight of the book is given to glaciers, their descriptions, their influence on the landscape, their geological record, the discovery of new glaciers, and other characteristics of these moving rivers of ice. While Muir offers descriptive powers unequaled among authors on nature, never repeating himself though constantly repeating his subject, the sheer repetition tends to bog the work down. Two whole pages might contribute to our view of a particular glacier, and suddenly Muir reports that he's finished a 200-mile leg of his journey on foot. He tells us when he's climbed a glacier, and along the way we've missed an entire week. Time and space almost have no medium in this publication, utterly lost when gazing upon a glacier. For nature lovers who will never go to Alaska, the descriptions in this book make the ranges and glaciers come alive in print, but as a dramatic journey, a travelogue, or a field manual for the Alaskan bush, this book forms only a vague shadow.

Nature is a beautiful and highly complicated phenomena of this world. Many have sought to understand it and capture its essence in writing. The nature writings of John Muir succeed in capturing the beauty of nature as well as the scientific aspect. I have to be honest, I wasn't that enthused about reading a book about science. I expected Muir's book to be identical to a science textbook, definitely not my idea of enjoyment. However, his book was actually full of detailed descriptions and creative uses of similes, metaphors, and analogies. In fact, it completely changed my perception of a scientific novel.

In his book, "Travels in Alaska", Muir brings alive the magnificence of the vast expanses of unexplored Alaskan territory. His prose reveals his enthusiasm for nature, and he weaves clear and distinct pictures through his words. Muir's writing is very personal. His favorable feelings toward the land are very apparent, and reading the book is like reading his diary or journal. He avoids using scientific jargon that would confuse and frustrate the average reader; his words are easily understood.

Muir also uses very detailed descriptions throughout "Travels in Alaska". Although at times his painstaking description is a plus, at others, he seems to take it a little too far. Numerous times throughout the book, Muir spent a paragraph or two talking about something slightly insignificant. He would go off on a tangent of enthusiasm for something as simple as a sunrise or the rain. While his careful observances make the book enjoyable, the sometimes excessive detail tends to detract from the point he was trying to make. The description also reveals that his heart and soul was in his research; this became very evident upon reading the long and thoughtful descriptions.

"Travels in Alaska" can be appreciated by a wide audience. Muir shines light upon the Alaskan territory, and he is detailed in his account of the many people he meets. Anyone could read the book and find enjoyment learning about Alaska when it was for the most part unsettled. Muir shares with the readers his keen insight upon the various Indian tribes that lived in Alaska. At one point in the book, he gives a very detailed description of one tribe's feasting and dancing. His observances capture exactly what he saw and the feelings these observances evoked in him.

John Muir's writing is of high quality. He incorporates beautiful and creative similes, metaphors, and analogies. His prose is very poetic, which makes it an enjoyable read. For example, Muir says that "when we contemplate the world as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty." His work is also very organized. The book is divided into 3 sections, or parts of his trip, as well as separate chapters devoted to specific subjects. Muir spends one chapter describing his trip to Puget Sound, another on Wrangell Island, etc. The book follows a specific format that ensures that everything is easily followed and understood.

Truthfully, I was impressed with the writing, and the fact that it was nothing like a textbook. It incorporated the literary aspect so well, that the book held my interest whereas a textbook would not have. I had the wrong impression of a scientific novel, and I urge anyone unfamiliar with the genre, to give "Travels in Alaska" a fair try. It may just change your mind about scientific writing.

I confess up front, it's been a few years since I read Muir's Travels in Alaska. Yet significant aspects I remember well. Given Muir's exuberance for life and almost everything he encounters in his travels, one almost looses view of Muir the botanist and geologist. But not quite. Here we find the author contemplating the activity of glaciers and documenting the flora of southeast Alaska. Muir (who tended strongly toward vegetarianism) gleefully entertaining himself by foiling duck hunters. Baffling the locals by happily wandering out into major storms.
The book is a journal of Muir's 1879, 1880, and 1890 trips (he wouldn't mind if we called them adventures) to SE Alaska's glaciers, rivers, and temperate rain forests. He died while preparing this volume for publication.
I remind myself, and anyone reading this, that Muir isn't for every reader. And, as other reviewers have stated, this may not be the volume in which to introduce oneself to the one-of-a-kind John Muir. One reviewer doesn't think that Muir is entirely credible in these accounts. I won't say whether or not this is wrong, but I tend to a different view. For some of us -- and certainly for Muir -- wilderness is a medicine, a spiritual tonic, so to speak. For the individual effected in this way, physical impediments and frailties rather dissolve away when he is alone in wildness. I once heard Graham Mackintosh (author of Into a Desert Place) speak of this. In all of his travels alone in the desert, he doesn't recall having ever been sick. This may not sound credible to some, but I strongly suspect it is true.
If you like Muir's writings, read this book. If you like the stuff of Best Sellers, perhaps you should look elsewhere.

The first time I did the John Muir Trail I diligently bought this book like good little Internet researcher. I assumed, like everyone else, that this book would help me plan my trip. Not so. This book is like a play-by-play description of walking down the trail. It doesn't mention preparation, weather, seasons, services, rest stops, food drops, transportation...nothing. I quickly shelved this book and moved on to Ray Jardine's bible of the PCT. Although Ray's book often borders on insanity, it is full of trail wisdom. If Winnett's guide is the GEO Metro of trail books, Jardines is the Ferrari.

One of the other reviewers said the book has nothing for planning a trip, but someone must have ripped out those pages from his copy. The book is more than a trail description; it includes descriptions of mid-way trailheads, resupply options, and other planning guides. This book is a great resource both for hiking the trail and planning to do so.

I hiked the JMT from Tuloumne Meadows in Yosemite to the Whitney Portal in July/August 1997. We used the book to plan the trip as well as for our exclusive guide book/map source on the hike. The book weighs next to nothing and I found it easier to keep track of one book rather than a whole bunch of maps, so it was worth taking. The book contains all necessary maps, trail descriptions in both directions, and a mileage/altitude chart. With the book, we always knew how many miles we had to hike in a given day and what the terrain would be like (elevation changes etc.) My only suggestion for improvement with the book would be for it to discuss recommended camping spots in more detail (perhaps by placing symbols on the map for particularly scenic spots, spots with bear boxes etc.) In general though, as someone who has hiked most of the JMT using this book as a guide, I'd highly recommend it. For the money and weight, you're unlikely to find anything better.

This is an above average field guide, but the writing is sometimes so dry that while reading you may feel as if you are hiking through death valley, not Mammoth or the Ritter Range. The map that comes with it is fantastic, although, it comes from the 1920's surveys of the area.

If you don't know much about naturalist John Muir, don't start with this book. First, read one of his own works -- like _My First Summer in the Sierra_ -- and then proceed to a tribute like _The Pathless Way: John Muir and American Wilderness_ by Michael P. Cohen.

Finish those two, and then you'll have the background information needed to appreciate _The Heart of John Muir's World_. The author obviously read a ton of correspondence to and from Muir family members and friends in order to glean insights into the lives of everyone close to John, as well as John himself. You'll find details here not common to other biographies, with a particular focus to the lifestyle the Muirs made for themselves in central Wisconsin. You'll realize how close the Muir brothers and sisters were, in spite of eventually settling in as varied locations as Virginia, Kansas, Nebraska, and California. You'll understand how all of them held an appreciation of nature beginning with the time that they grew up and worked on the family farm -- and that John's ideas about preserving wild areas began right there, too. On three different occasions during his lifetime, John looked into buying and setting aside part of the Wisconsin landscape that he loved, so that it could be enjoyed by others as he had seen it as a child. But either the deals fell through, or the current owners refused to sell. In spite of those setbacks, a small John Muir Memorial Park now stands in Marquette County, Wisconsin, while John's larger contribution to us and to future generations is half a continent away, in Yosemite National Park.

If you're not content with simply knowing that he was a naturalist, the founder of the Sierra Club, and a major instigator for the creation of the U.S. National Parks system, you'll find more about John Muir's day-to-day world in this book. And when you finish, you will understand that the subtitle "Wisconsin, Family, and Wilderness Discovery" refers to the three great loves of his life.

It was a good book, quit imformative actually. I guess I can't tell you how much good it will do me until I'm up on the trail. But after reading this I'm pretty confident of what to expect.

Graham white has collected a fine Scottish edition of Muir's mountaineering essays along with appreciative essays on muir as a mountaineer by Arthur W. Ewart, Francis P. Farquhar, Ken Crocket, Samuel hall Young, and Aubrey haines. This edition serves the needs of readers in the British Isles since my own edition of Muir's Mountaineering essays was not readily available on the other side of the Atlantic. In his introduction, White explains that "it is equally clear that in the boldness of all Muir's solitary ascents, it was not the mountain which was conquered, but the limitations of self which were transcended. White expresses grave concern about the trashing of mountains by countless hordes of people in the late twentieth century whose sole purpose is to "bag another peak." He admonishes us with a forceful statement: "If we are to sustain the world's fragile mountain environments through another century of recreation and tourism development, the challenge is for the climbing, and hill-walking community to emulate John Muir's example by adopting a far deeper ethos." Though some of the essays White collects are a bit duplicative, overall Graham White's new collection makes for a very good read.

I love this series and I have all the books - so I know. It hurts me to only offer three stars but, simply, this one just isn't as good as the rest. First of all, it's nothing like as advertised above. There are 18 stories, but only 9 of those shown on that cover, which has been redesigned, too - I don't know what happened. Despite the publisher's notes above, there is NOTHING from Bonington, Venables or Davidson - no story of -148 wind chill on Mt. McKinley (the one I anticipated most). We got some wires crossed here someplace. Of the 18 stories you do get, 5 of them are fiction (including the 2 longest )- a greater percentage than any other in the series except "Dark". Of the 13 nonfiction tales, several have very little to do with survival as we've come to know it from earlier books in the series - they really just express wonder at nature. I'm surprised at the inclusion of "The Storm" by Junger - it fits, sure, but it's so well-known by now, and one of the best features of the Adrenaline Series has been how it introduces us to stories and authors we may not know. I do not mean to say that these aren't well-written pieces: the ones by Chaplin, Groom and Gann are riveting. I guess it just depends on what you expect. But don't let this book be your introduction to this awesome series; get High, Epic or Wild Blue instead, and if you've read them already, don't expect as much here.