| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography. By Steven J. Holmes. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. xvi, 309 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-299-16150-1. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-299-16154-4.)

Decades after his death, John Muir remains American environmentalism's patron saint; interpretations exist aplenty, though several have a hagiographical air about them. Not so Steven J. Holmes's intensive reading of Muir's intellectual and emotional development. Maintaining an appropriate blend of respect and critical insight, Holmes investigates the young John Muir. Yet he does so to lay the foundations for understanding Muir's life as a whole. Holmes takes issue with much of Muir scholarship, using close textual analysis, but Holmes matches evidence with imagination and a sense of social and cultural contexts. 1

The main thesis of this self-styled environmental biography depicts Muir as the product of key life experiences. Using the psychoanalytical formulations of object relations theory, Holmes argues that Muir did not come to his wilderness appreciation and eventual relationship with Yosemite through a sudden romantic conversion. Rather, Muir constructed his concept of wilderness from his psychological development. Especially important were "enduring erotic relationships with certain natural beings and phenomena." Those relationships drew upon "energies and images of his relationships with important women" that "were ultimately nonsexual in character." Muir projected those life experiences onto the natural world, using familiar religious and domestic imagery. . . .

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