Bringing the Mountain Home

Rating:
Summary: This book is the perfect gift for a hiking friend...
Review: Bringing the Mountain Home by SueEllen Campbell is a book to treat both your emotions and your senses. The book of essays is largely about the Colorado Rocky Mountains but also has some gems about an Africa sojourn. The essays are visceral, intelligent, personal, and universal. As she eloquently says in the book: "In fact, I realized I was taking two walks at once. One was intensely personal and immediate, my body, sense, memories moving through a specific and extraordinary place and moment. The other was shared, my own experience formed by my culture, by other, earlier visitors to wild places, by circumstances, attitudes, assumptions, words, even emotions I had no part in creating but had somehow absorbed into myself" (x).

I love the gentle humor (such as the time she finds her friends all enjoying a backpacking trip while she somehow ends up as cook and camp-person) and the keen observations. I grew up in this area, but Campbell has looked at it with such wonder and detail, I can hardly wait to open my eyes and look around me more carefully. She knows every wildflower, every animal, every path and the reader is inspired to hike with eyes and ears wide open. With chapters titled with elements such as desire, pristine, trudging, grandeur, and misery, she captures so much of the wilderness experience in its many facets. I feel the misery of paddling a canoe when those muscles ache as well as the glory of seeing wildflowers in full profusion in a mountain valley. Campbell perfectly describes the sudden urges to get out in the wilderness, and then fearlessly describes both the glories and glooms of those trips.

Campbell's writing is lyrical, enthusiastic, honest, sensory. She is a master of words and of wilderness. I relish reading and rereading this book of essays and will never go on an Alaskan backpacking trip without it.

This book is the perfect gift for a hiking friend or a city-bound person who is far from the wilds. I recommend it to Amazon readers without hesitation. You're in for a treat, and so are your friends.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: I loved this book - it's thoughtful, warm, and wise -- and it says so much about both the natural world and the human heart. I hightly recommend it!