The Story of My Boyhood and Youth

After reading Alaska Days with John Muir, written by his friend and traveling companion Samuel Young, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Muir's own account of his early life: beginning in East Lothian, Scotland, where he was born in 1838; immigrated with his father and brother to America in 1849; settled......more

So as well as being the father of the national parks, a fearless wanderer, a raconteur, a force for all that is good in the world, John Muir was also Caractacus Potts. This book recounts his childhood from his earliest days in Dunbar, Scotland, the family's move to Wisconsin where they set up their......more

This is a book I re-read, this time for a book group, where each student read a different book by a naturalist. They’ve been studying nature writing and the teacher wanted to take them deeper into how the writers were changed by their own environment, thus the group and talk about how we also might......more

John Muir’s personal accounts of moving from Scotland to Wisconsin interested me as I spent at least 15 years of my youth in Wisconsin. I could relate to his description of Winter and some of the birds and other wildlife. The more I learn of Muir— my interest grows as I have a fondness for nature an......more

John Muir’s memoir is a reflective archive of a life lived both as a boy in 19th century Scotland and as a teenage immigrant to the wilderness of Wisconsin. Much of his account, whilst fascinating to the modern reader in how starkly different life as a child in Scotland and indeed America is today a......more