Description:
From a cult-favorite nature writer, a memoir of climbing, California, and the double-sided coin of legacy and preservation.
In Daniel Duane's childhood, John Muir was apostle and prophet, the man who taught Californians to love nature. Duane's family worshipped in the Muir way by backpacking, skiing, and climbing. They read the scripture, too, from Muir's earnest essays to the memoirs of the charismatic geologist Clarence King to classic accounts of Indigenous California. Paradise, for Duane's family, was Yosemite National Park. For Duane, though, devotional study of Yosemite meant confrontation with its nuanced, violent--and sometimes absurd--history. In Yosemite Falls, Duane tells the story of his family and the park, populated by the characters of his own life and of California past. His beloved outdoorsman father, who taught him to climb and cast a long shadow. His mother, his wife, and his daughters, who all share his passion for the outdoors. Ishi, who in 1911 was the last living member of the Yahi people, taken in as an object of study by UC Berkeley. And Muir himself, whose messy biography and Victorian worldview forced Duane into a painful apostasy about California's "great" men and their gospel of the wild. Yosemite Falls is a vital and exuberant correction to the canon, offering an idiosyncratic new history of wilderness in the Golden State, where white supremacy, cultural theft, and governmental overreach abound. With wry humor and inimitable style, Duane has crafted a book that is both playful and moving, at once a memoir of life in the mountain west and a reckoning with the true legacies of his family's ecological heroes.Brief description: Daniel Duane is the author of six books, including the novel Looking for Mo, the climbing memoir Lighting Out: A Vision of California and the Mountains, and the cult-classic surfing memoir Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast. He has been a contributor to The New York Times for three decades, and his writing has also appeared in Outside, The Guardian, GQ, Alta, Men's Journal, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing. He lives and surfs in Santa Cruz, California.
Review Quotes:
"Yosemite Falls is the mountain book we've all been waiting for. It's the great, big, sad, and funny update to the John-Muir-Jack-Kerouac-Cheryl-Strayed epic of California life outdoors, the book everybody in my world is going to read and talk about. But it's also 100% Duane. Nobody else could tell a can't-put-it-down story that weaves together freaking out on El Cap with the question of whether his dad's best friend was an asshole, burning religious scripture on the Muir Trail with the possibility that the California genocides might have been Muir's own fault--plus Muir getting run out of Yosemite for sleeping with his boss's wife and the open question of whether Duane's daughters will ever recover from his own sketchy parenting. Duane was already the underground GOAT of Yosemite writers. Yosemite Falls makes it official. This book is Duane's masterpiece: serious as a heart-attack, full of love and rage and, like Dan himself, always ready to hug it out." --Jimmy Chin, mountaineer and Academy Award-winning director of Free Solo
"Yosemite Falls flays open the dark history of a beloved national park with diamond-sharp prose that will make you question so many more of our founding myths. Along the way, Daniel Duane flays himself open too, as he sets out to walk the famous John Muir trail and finds the most difficult terrain to be the one inside himself. Yosemite Falls takes us past wildflower meadows, through storms, up epic climbing pitches, and then back through time; like any revelatory outdoor adventure, you won't want this book to end." --Caroline Paul, New York Times-bestselling author of Why Fly and The Gutsy Girl
"Fans of Duane's writing will recognize his evocative storytelling, fine irony, and intimate knowledge of the outdoors. A lifetime in the making, Yosemite Falls is a captivating blend of introspection and unvarnished history. A revelatory and deeply moving examination of California's so-called 'wilderness.'" --Rosanna Xia, author of California Against the Sea "I always knew I loved Yosemite, but it took this book, and its reckoning with our painful past, for me to understand the depth of that love, which I now know to be unconditional. I've rarely read anything that made me ponder so much." --Tommy Caldwell, rock climber and author of The Push Praise for Caught Inside: "[Duane is] an ontologist of dudedom, Henry David Thoreau doing aerials on a fiberglass board." ―Will Blythe, Esquire