Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
If life is a ferment, as we are told it is, how long it took this yeast to leaven the whole loaf! Man is evidently the end of the series, he is the top of the biological tree. His specialization upon physical lines seems to have ended far back in geologic time; his future specialization and development is evidently to be upon mental and spiritual lines. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
I made a cross-gun that had a barrel (in the end of which you dropped the arrow) and a lock with a trigger, and that was really a spiteful, dangerous weapon. About my fifteenth year I had a real gun, a small, double-barrelled gun made by some ingenious blacksmith, I fancy. But it had fairly good shooting qualities--several times I brought down wild pigeons from the tree tops with it. Rabbits, gray squirrels, partridges, also fell before it. I bought it of a pedlar for three dollars, paying on the instalment plan, with money made out of maple sugar. ... Read more

Book Description
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.Download Description
We are coming more and more to like the savor of the wild and the unconventional. Perhaps it is just this savor or suggestion of free fields and woods, both in his life and in his books, that causes so many persons to seek out John Burroughs in his retreat among the trees and rocks on the hills that skirt the western bank of the Hudson. To Mr. Burroughs more perhaps than to any other living American might be applied these words in Genesis: "See, the smell of my son is as the smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed"--so redolent of the soil and of the hardiness and plenitude of rural things is the influence that emanates from him. ... Read more

Book Description
John Burroughs (1837-1921) emerged from an obscure boyhood in the Catskill Mountains to write more than thirty books, create the genre of the nature essay, and become the preeminent nature writer of his day. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Excellent
I first got turned on to Ed Renehan when I saw him on C-SPAN discussing the book he wrote about the family of Theodore Roosevelt, entitled THE LION'S PRIDE. After enjoying LION'S PRIDE, I purchased and learned a lotfrom Renehan's beautifully written account of John Brown and the HarpersFerry raid, entitled THE SECRET SIX. Then, although I'd never heard of JohnBurroughs, I moved onto this excellent biography of a fascinating butneglected figure of American history, and am glad I did. Now I will turn tosome of Burroughs's own writings, if I can find them!

Exquisite
Ed Renehan has put together an exquisite, instructive review of the long life of John Burroughs. The old lion emerges in all his splendor in these pages -- intellectual, literate (he knew Emerson and Whitman among others),worldly (he had a mistress who was a New York psychiatrist), and above all,a sympathetic observer of the natural world. We need his perspective asnever before. -- John Hanson Mitchell, author of CEREMONIAL TIME, LIVING ATTHE END OF TIME, and other books

A real education
Edward Renehan has restored John Burroughs to his rightful place in the history of American literature and conservation.-- Frank Graham, Jr., author of SINCE SILENT SPRING, THE AUDUBON ARK, and other books

Superb
"Renehan's biography does precisely what it sets out to do: it provides the thorough, responsible, readable biography which has so long been wanting in Burroughs scholarship." -- Ameican Nature Writing,1993 edition

Wonderful
At the tag end of our scarred century, we grasp, almost in desperation, for a new purchase on nature. To assist in this restorative effort, we can look back on the work and the way of life of earlier naturalists who tried to hold our neglectful attention. Edward Renehan, with this affectionate, critical biography, has given us back John Burroughs, one of the best of that surprisingly contentious (and interesting) breed. ------ William S. McFeely, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning GRANT: A BIOGRAPHY, and other books. ... Read more

Amazon.com
Friend of Walt Whitman, companion to Theodore Roosevelt, and friendly rival of John Muir, John Burroughs is seldom read today. But in the last decades of the 19th century, his prolific nature essays helped spawn the Nature Study movement and made him an international celebrity. In 1875 Henry James praised his "real genius" for natural history and called him a "more humorous, more available, and more sociable Thoreau." In this illustrated biography, Edward Kanze sketches the trajectory of Burroughs's long career, from his childhood on a farm in the Catskills to his decades in retirement along the Hudson River.

As early as 1871, when his first book of nature essays was published, Burroughs was acclaimed as an American Gilbert White, the pioneering British naturalist and author of The Natural History of Selborne. Readers were charmed by Burroughs's enthusiastic accounts of ordinary walks made extraordinary by keen observation. By the late 1880s, when his first collection of nature essays for children was published, he was one of America's most popular interpreters of the natural world. He kept writing until 1921, when he died at the age of 84.

Edward Kanze, a naturalist and writer, has written an engaging narrative that nevertheless leaves the reader hungry for more information. The photographs, though pleasant, are sometimes tangential: "mourning doves reminded Burroughs of their extinct relations, the passenger pigeons," reads one caption. The biography may succeed as an introduction to Burroughs's life, but in the end one wishes for more of the master's own prose and a better sense of its social context. --Pete HolloranBook Description
John Burroughs was one of the earliest and most articulate pioneers of the United States conservation movement, publishing twenty-eight books on the natural world during the height of the Industrial Revolution. As an author, teacher, and poet, he wrote with intimacy and feeling, illustrating verbal landscapes and providing philosophical insights about the environment. People by the hundreds of thousands relished his writings. The World of John Burroughs focuses not only on his work, but also on Burroughs's personal life. His friends included Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and John Muir. The text is enhanced by Burroughs's essays and poems, and, uniquely, by endearing recollections of his granddaughter. With engaging narrative and illuminating photographs by author Edward Kanze, The World of John Burroughs celebrates Burroughs's dedication to studying the world and making nature come to life on the written page.
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Customer Reviews (18)

A Joy to Read
Well researched, embellished with the author's gorgeous photos, this book is a joy to read.It is a biography and more!

For the mind and the eyes
The World of John Burroughs is a very readable biography of this great naturalist and writer. It is also refreshment for the eyes. Many photographs help portray the land and people that helped to shape this man.As a great grand niece of JB, I highly recommend this book for its accuracyand beauty.

Too brief
There is a lot more to the story of John Burroughs than what is included here. We need to understand the social and historical context in which Burroughs lived and wrote, and Kanze does not help us.

Good pics but brief bio
This large-format table-top picture book provides a wealth of photographs of John Burroughs but a very light and brief biography of the man. There is not much text. Great illustrations, but for details on JB's life goelsewhere.

Clear prose, meticulous research, stunningillustration
John Burroughs, the naturalist and philosopher, was a best-seller in his day (the late 19th century and early 20th), a Thoreau without rough edges and politics. If he has enjoyed a revival in recent years it is probablydue to Ed Kanze's stunningly written and attractively presented biography,"The World of John Burroughs,'' published by Abrams in 1993, and nowout of print. The good news: Sierra Club Books has come out with thispaperback version. Some of Burroughs is dated today, and as Kanze notes, hepublished some mediocre essays along with the good stuff. But much ofBurroughs' nature writings are brilliant in their painstaking observationand solid prose:

"Most persons think the bee gets honey from theflowers, but she does not: honey is a product of the bee; it is the nectarof the flowers with the bee added. What the bee gets from the flower issweet water: this she puts through a process of her own and imparts to ither own quality."

Kanze, like a good conversationalist, leads thereader gently through Burroughs' life and writings. Burroughs was a real19th-century figure: He consorted with the literary likes of John Muir andWilliam Dean Howells and in later life was a favorite of Teddy Rooseveltand Henry Ford -- not to mention the Vassar girls who visited him at hisrustic Hudson Valley hideaway, Slabsides. (Burroughs' private life was, ina word, difficult, and Kanze is unstinting in dealing with the birth of hisone -- illegitimate -- child.) It is not surprising that Kanze is anaturalist himself and has been a museum curator. The book has the feel ofa nature walk or a good museum exhibit, in which a subject not readilyfamiliar to the reader becomes fascinating with the help of a terrificguide. There are well-chosen historical photographs and the luminous naturephotography of the author, each photo chosen for its relevance to one oranother passage from Burroughs' work. Particularly moving are the photos ofBurroughs in Slabsides; paired with Kanze's own color photos of the house'spreserved interior.You find your eye traveling back and forth from the oldphoto to the new, to see the same fireplace stone here, the unpeeled birchdesk there. ... Read more

Book Description
SHARP EYES: JOHN BURROUGHS AND AMERICAN NATURE WRITING is the first full collection of essays and scholarship about John Burroughs, who was one of America's greatest and most influential nature writers of the 19th and early 20th century. Long overdue, this book marks a resurgence of interest in Burroughs, who was an immensely popular figure in his own time, a friend of such disparate well known figures as Walt Whitman, John Muir, Henry Ford, and Theodore Roosevelt.SHARP EYES includes essays on Burroughs's influence on the nature essay itself, his relationships, literary or personal, with his contemporaries (Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Muir), his engagement with issues such as conservation, science, and religion, and his influence on nature education.Readers of this collection will find a companion volume in THE ART OF SEEING THINGS, a collection of essays by Burroughs which includes many of the essays discussed by scholars in SHARP EYES. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Incredible Reading
Not only will you pass page after page with ease, but you will learn a great many things!! Burroughs will become a close friend and teacher (of language, ecology, nature, people, and life in general) of the highest order. His work is phenomenal! I cant recommend it highly enough!!

Read everything you can from him, it should definitely be required! Also give it to your children. The preface of this book is by a teacher in Chicago that tells of the remarkable learning and enthusiasm she found in her pupils, upon reading Burroughs. I can't help but feel the same enthusiasm!!

Do enjoy!

A Burroughs anthology at last, and a superb one!
Charlotte Walker, a professor of English at the State University of New York at Oneonta, has assembled the first anthology of critical essays on the naturalist, literary critic, poet, and philosopher John Burroughs (1837-1921). This is an extraordinary collection. Walker includes a wide array of voices, many of them (including my own) from outside academia. All have important things to say about Burroughs, who once towered above the American literary landscape but whose reputation has been eroded by time. A renewal of interest in the work of the Catskill-born Burroughs is underway, and this book is both a product of that movement and a light to lead the way. As the author of a concise biography and appreciation of John Burroughs ("The World of John Burroughs," published by Sierra Club Books), I congratulate Walker on a job brilliantly done. ... Read more

Book Description
When the American poet and naturalist John Burroughs opened his door to observe the world around him, his written findings became an inspiration to people all across the country. His published work was both widely read and acclaimed, and Slabsides, his home in the Catskills, became a favorite meetinghouse for such illustrious visitors as Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir. The only biography about Burroughs available for young readers, this abundantly illustrated book is replete with historical anecdotes and engaging details, and offers an intimate look at the life and work of an environmental pioneer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

An excellent contribution
Mr. Kanze and I seem to agree on at least one thing, that Ms. Wadsworth's JOHN BURROUGHS: THE SAGE OF SLABSIDES is an excellent contribution. As for my own book, I've searched it for the word "kidnap" and can'tseem to find that phrase anywhere. -- Edward J. Renehan, Jr., author ofJOHN BURROUGHS: AN AMERICAN NATURALIST

This is a terrific book! --- Edward Kanze
Ginger Wadsworth, distinguished author of children's books on John Muir and Rachel Carson, brings the naturalist, literary critic, and philosopher John Burroughs to life in The Sage of Slabsides.As a Burroughs biographermyself (my THE WORLD OF JOHN BURROUGHS was published in 1993 by HarryAbrams, with a deal in the works to revive the book next year inpaperback), I am in a position to judge the quality of Wadsworth'streatment.I think she does a brilliant job of telling the story ofBurroughs's long and eventful life in a way that children will findcaptivating. There are quotes from Burroughs's published writings, journalentries, and an array of fine photographs, all well chosen to appeal tokids.The scholarship is first-rate, too.For example, Wadsworth notesthe adoption of Burroughs's son, Julian, in July, 1878, as is documented inhis journal, rather than repeating the false claim of Edward Renehan's JOHNBURROUGHS: AN AMERICAN NATURALIST that the boy was essentially kidnappedfrom its biological mother in April.The secret of Burroughs's success maybe that, with his playful humor and passion for nature and theout-of-doors, he remained a kid at heart throughout his nearly 84 years. He had a genius for passing along his childlike enthusiasm to others, whichexplains why people could not get enough of his company.Wadsworth keepsup the tradition.Boys, girls, and adults reading this book will likely beinspired to walk a few of Burroughs's forest paths. ... Read more