Rating: 
Summary: A Love Affair with Wilderness
Review: A vivid and delightful description of Walker's 200 days alone in America's wild places. Made me want to go! The reader is treated to intimate details about her adventures in her solo trip through natural wilderness areas. One meets a variety of characters, not all of whom share Walker's desire to preserve the wilderness (and many of whom are surprised to find a middle-aged woman traveling alone and without a gun yet). Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Reading
Review: A wonderful book for all fans of our National Parks and those who enjoy out of doors experiences. Melissa is a combination of John McPhee and William Least Heat Moon!
Rating:
Summary: Claiming Herself and the Wilderness
Review: As she approached her fiftieth birthday, author Melissa Walker found herself hostage to "hurry sickness," the halfhearted race to meet the demands of job, family, household, and friends. To reclaim her own life and authentic purpose, Walker sought out the wild places of this country in order to try living instead according to the natural world's rhythms of day and season. What began through a lifelong love of nature and a midlife urgency to reevalaute her personal life and priorities led Walker on a larger journey to a new purpose: claiming the American wilderness as her own cause and becoming an important voice in its preservation.Living On Wilderness Time combines the best features of travel writing, the personal memoir, and a call to action. Along the way it is populated with fascinating people and wild places in the American West and the South. The interior landscape is as intriguing as the external world, as Walker must balance her zeal for exploring and saving wild places with the sudden inclination, for instance, to shop for a Chanel blush. Walker's writing is clear and spare, with flashes of insight and wit and steady good humor. One is somehow changed by reading the book, both through new understanding of the power of the wilderness, and new respect for the passionate work that people who dare to venture outside the fog and clutter of daily life can summon themselves to do.
Rating:
Summary: Claiming Herself and the Wilderness
Review: As she approached her fiftieth birthday, author Melissa Walker found herself hostage to "hurry sickness," the halfhearted race to meet the demands of job, family, household, and friends. To reclaim her own life and authentic purpose, Walker sought out the wild places of this country in order to try living instead according to the natural world's rhythms of day and season. What began through a lifelong love of nature and a midlife urgency to reevalaute her personal life and priorities led Walker on a larger journey to a new purpose: claiming the American wilderness as her own cause and becoming an important voice in its preservation. Living On Wilderness Time combines the best features of travel writing, the personal memoir, and a call to action. Along the way it is populated with fascinating people and wild places in the American West and the South. The interior landscape is as intriguing as the external world, as Walker must balance her zeal for exploring and saving wild places with the sudden inclination, for instance, to shop for a Chanel blush. Walker's writing is clear and spare, with flashes of insight and wit and steady good humor. One is somehow changed by reading the book, both through new understanding of the power of the wilderness, and new respect for the passionate work that people who dare to venture outside the fog and clutter of daily life can summon themselves to do.
Rating:
Summary: Preserving our Wild Places, Including the Ones Inside Us
Review: Breathes there a woman with soul so dead, who never to herself hath said . . . "I gotta get outta here!" Melissa Walker is one lady who knows how to live her dream. Burning with a desire to explore the wild places designated by the Wilderness Act of 1964, Walker leaves her comfortable home in Atlanta, and her understanding husband of 30 years, to set forth on a journey of adventure. Without a companion, without even a dog for protection, she chose to spend her time in the wilderness alone. Was it worth it? Listen to this: Surprised by a snowstorm in Arizona, afraid her tent is going to blow away with her in it, Walker crawls into her sleeping bag wearing all the clothes she has brought along. But at 3:00 am she has to use the pit toilet 50 yards away. She crawls out of the tent to find that the sky has cleared, revealing more stars than she's ever seen in her life. "I'd left home expecting to find warm days, cool nights, and a desert in bloom. Instead I found this last blast of winter, a snow-covered landscape with a view of the universe so clear that it was difficult to turn my eyes away from the sky. I breathed deeply and felt the cold starlit space rush in. "
Make no mistake, Walker is an environmentalist-yet her presentation is balanced. In a designated wilderness, she sees cattle destroying a river bank; yet visiting a well-managed cattle ranch, she sees wildlife of all kinds.
Grizzly bears, cougars, moose, and all kinds of human characters populate this book. When Walker's husband Jerome joins her for a week of camping in the Northwest, it's like a vacation and respite from what by then had become her real work - experiencing the wilderness in solitude.
What is "wilderness?" Under the law, it is defined as "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." The word "visitor" is what creates the paradox in this situation, for among the visitors may be hunters, ranchers, hikers, and foresters themselves, who by "managing" the wilderness, inevitably affect it.
I recommend this book as a well-written, often lyrical, memoir, and also for anyone who is interested in nature and in preserving wild places for future generations.
Rating:
Summary: Preserving our Wild Places, Including the Ones Inside Us
Review: Breathes there a woman with soul so dead, who never to herself hath said . . . "I gotta get outta here!" Melissa Walker is one lady who knows how to live her dream. Burning with a desire to explore the wild places designated by the Wilderness Act of 1964, Walker leaves her comfortable home in Atlanta, and her understanding husband of 30 years, to set forth on a journey of adventure. Without a companion, without even a dog for protection, she chose to spend her time in the wilderness alone. Was it worth it? Listen to this: Surprised by a snowstorm in Arizona, afraid her tent is going to blow away with her in it, Walker crawls into her sleeping bag wearing all the clothes she has brought along. But at 3:00 am she has to use the pit toilet 50 yards away. She crawls out of the tent to find that the sky has cleared, revealing more stars than she's ever seen in her life. "I'd left home expecting to find warm days, cool nights, and a desert in bloom. Instead I found this last blast of winter, a snow-covered landscape with a view of the universe so clear that it was difficult to turn my eyes away from the sky. I breathed deeply and felt the cold starlit space rush in. "
Make no mistake, Walker is an environmentalist-yet her presentation is balanced. In a designated wilderness, she sees cattle destroying a river bank; yet visiting a well-managed cattle ranch, she sees wildlife of all kinds.
Grizzly bears, cougars, moose, and all kinds of human characters populate this book. When Walker's husband Jerome joins her for a week of camping in the Northwest, it's like a vacation and respite from what by then had become her real work - experiencing the wilderness in solitude.
What is "wilderness?" Under the law, it is defined as "an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." The word "visitor" is what creates the paradox in this situation, for among the visitors may be hunters, ranchers, hikers, and foresters themselves, who by "managing" the wilderness, inevitably affect it.
I recommend this book as a well-written, often lyrical, memoir, and also for anyone who is interested in nature and in preserving wild places for future generations.
Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking and wonderful
Review: First - a bias - Melissa is a dear friend. However, going beyond that, it was a wonderful book which speaks of courage and committment to an ideal which is rare in these troubled times. I felt it is relevant in helping one deal with the many wildernesses in life - the real woods, the complex wilderness in which we all live from day to day and the wilderness within. I highly recommend this "labor of love" to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Thought provoking and wonderful
Review: First - a bias - Melissa is a dear friend. However, going beyond that, it was a wonderful book which speaks of courage and committment to an ideal which is rare in these troubled times. I felt it is relevant in helping one deal with the many wildernesses in life - the real woods, the complex wilderness in which we all live from day to day and the wilderness within. I highly recommend this "labor of love" to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Masterful Storyteller
Review: Great storytelling. Walker is a masterful listener, of both the land and the people who are shaped by the land. She makes a passionate case for wilderness, and for the value of solo traveling.
Rating:
Summary: Living on Wilderness Time
Review: Life is about the journey, not about the destination. Melissa Walker vividly takes the reader with her on her quest for purpose, importance, and self. Traveling through American's wilderness, the reader experiences Walker's fear, uncertainty, humor, and re-examination of her life. Without delivering a message, readers are challenged to reevaluate their own lives and to live "on Wilderness Time" everyday, seeking their own raison d'etre.
|
