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    The Story of my Boyhood and Youth: An early years biography of a pioneering environmentalist
    Unavailable
    The Story of my Boyhood and Youth: An early years biography of a pioneering environmentalist
    Unavailable
    The Story of my Boyhood and Youth: An early years biography of a pioneering environmentalist
    Ebook181 pages2 hours

    The Story of my Boyhood and Youth: An early years biography of a pioneering environmentalist

    By John Muir and Terry Gifford

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The Story of my Boyhood and Youth is the affecting memoir of the now internationally renowned John Muir, a Scottish-American boy subject to a most unusual upbringing, his transition into adulthood, and the path that led him to petition for the concept of protected national parks.

    Born in East Lothian, Scotland in 1838, Muir was raised by a fanatically strict, religious father with his numerous brothers and sisters and loving mother. From an early age, a shy Muir showed fascination with the natural world, and at aged eleven, his father announced the family were to move to an American wilderness in Wisconsin – Muir had a new playground.

    His adolescence is spent labouring on the family’s grassroots farm. Working seventeen-hour days, an exhausted yet inquisitive Muir desperately snatches moments to himself, yearning to explore the environment around him, secretly studying books on topics other than religion, and rising at 1 a.m. to pursue his hobby of inventing intricate time and energy-saving devices – much to his father’s disapproval and everyone else’s admiration.

    At age twenty-two, Muir takes it upon himself to apply to university, and does so without financial or moral support from his father. He makes his way to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to study chemistry and botany, and though never graduating with a degree, he is satisfied that he had learned all he wanted to there, before completing the rest of his nature education in ‘the university of the wilderness’.

    The Story of my Boyhood and Youth includes a new foreword by Terry Gifford, and offers insight into the development of Muir’s spiritual connection with the natural world, and suggests an explanation for his passion for freedom in the wilderness, a stark contrast to the forced rigidity of his early years.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVertebrate Digital
    Release dateDec 19, 2016
    ISBN9781911342038
    Unavailable
    The Story of my Boyhood and Youth: An early years biography of a pioneering environmentalist
    Author

    John Muir

    John Muir (1838-1914) was one of the most influential conservationists and nature writers in American history. He was instrumental in the creation and passage of the National Parks Act, and founder of the Sierra Club, acting as its president until his death. Muir was a spirit so free that all he did to prepare for an expedition was to "throw some tea and bread into an old sack and jump the back fence." 

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