| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Steven J. Holmes. The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1999. Pp. xv, 309. Cloth $55.00, paper $22.95.

As a central figure in American environmentalism and a founder of the Sierra Club, John Muir has been the subject of a number of biographies. Steven J. Holmes's study of Muir's early life is, in part, a response to the ways in which previous biographers have relied on and nourished traditional images of Muir's early life, including "the wild child" (p. 4) and his ecstatic conversion experience at Yosemite. In this work, Holmes reexamines "the Muir myth" (p. 14) not merely to assess its truthfulness but to test its moral utility in our own time. 1

This is an environmental biography that focuses on Muir's developing relationship with the natural world. But it is also a psychosocial biography that employs a variety of psychoanalysis called the "object relations" approach (p. 11). Going beyond the Freudian concentration on the dynamics between parent and child, it asks which relationships—including those involving the non-human environment—are the important ones for the individual. Holmes's main sources are the writings of Muir himself, which he subjects to a close textual analysis. He makes extensive use of letters, especially those between Muir and important women in his life, most notably his friend Jeanne Carr. . . .

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