Read April 2021 - Zoom Reading Circle
This book had true 'laugh out loud' parts. It was hard to read when I was holding a sleeping baby! :D I truly enjoyed this book although I have a sneaking suspicion I might get annoyed with the author in real life. Some of the people he mocks really remind me of myself!! :) I enjoyed the relationship between him and Katz and was fascinated by both their adventures and experiences alone the trail and the historic and scientific background information. I would be interested in a follow up on more recent times about the trail, forest service, national parks and etc. So in some ways it did feel dated (written in 1998). One interesting note - since I read this book the same month as The Prodigal Summer, all the talk about the chestnut trees and the horrible blight that killed them definitely connected those two reads. I really wish I could have seen those magnificent trees. And this book adds to the grave concern about climate change, extinction of species, and mismanagement of lands and nature.
Quote from the book...
In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature and either/or proposition - either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit - that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware river might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn't all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and tilled fields.
Reader's Digest interviews Bill Bryson - A Walk in the Woods
A Walk in the Woods - official movie trailer
A Walk in the Woods - Hike with the cast featurette
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