Giants in the earth : the California redwoods / edited with an introduction by Peter Johnstone ; photo editor, Peter E. Palmquist.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Johnstone, Peter, 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--California.

American literature.

Trees.

Coast redwood.

California.

Coast redwood--Literary collections.

Trees--Literary collections.

Trees--California.

California--Literary collections.

Genre:

Literary collections.

Literature.

Physical Description:

xvi, 304 pages, 64 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 21 cm

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, Calif. : Heyday Books, [2001]

Summary:

The coast redwoods and the giant sequoias of California have inspired an extraordinary body of writing. In Giants in the Earth, the carefully chosen words of storytellers, philosophers, poets, and journalists present an cloquent and engaging record of human history in the redwoods.

In 1849 L. K. Woods found the redwoods of Humboldt County to be a "dismal forest prison." By 1883, Frnest Ingersoll was extolling the "manly attitudes" and "muscularly graceful motions" of lumberjacks. In The Lands of the Sun (1927), Mary Austin wrote about the incommunicable majesty of the gigantic trunks of the big trees of the Sierra Nevada. Some forty years later, Tom Wolfe brought his sixties sensibilities to the San Eran cisco Bay Area redwoods: "Golden particles, brilliant forest green particles, each one picking up the light, and all shimmering and flowing like an electronic mosaic, pure California neon dust."

From John Muir and Jack London to Joan Dunning and Armistead Maupin, and with a spectacular portfolio of historic photographs assembled by Peter Palmquist, Giants in the Larth is a stirting ode to California's most treasured asset

The tallest, the most massive, the most mystical, the most threatened California's coast redwoods and giant sequoias have always evoked superlatives, and with this anthology we can add still more. To describe the groves of redwoods and the emotions they inspire, generations of writers have had to expand their imaginations and stretch their language. In the process they have produced some of America's most stirring, thought provoking, and eye opening literature and, suprprisingly, some of its most varied.

The selections in this book range from tales of American Indians who saw these trees as ancient and permanent parts of their world to the anguished pleas of contemporary activists who have witnessed the devastation of the trees by chainsaws and saw mills, from awestruck reactions of early European explorers who wandered unexpectedly into almost indescribable grandcur to roiling tales of loggers and sawyers. In a variety of forms myth, poetry, fiction, essay, diatribe, and more Giants in the Earth presents multiple views of one of the world's great treasures and explores the many ways in which we humans have interacted with it.

Contents:

An Ancient Stock

Becoming a Redwood / Dana Gioia 3

from The Last Redwoods / Francois Leydet 5

from Sierra Nevada: The Naturalist's Companion / Verna R. Johnston 10

from An Island Called California / Elna S. Bakker 19

from Indian Lore of the North California Coast / Austen D. Warburton, Joseph F. Endert 28

from To the American Indian / Lucy Thompson 31

from Diaries of the Portola and Anza Expeditions / Juan Crespi, Miguel De Costanso, Pedro Font 37

from A Voyage to California / Auguste Duhaut-Cilly 47

from California Life Illustrated / William Taylor 53

Song of the Redwood-Tree / Walt Whitman 61

The Big Trees

from Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity in California / J. M. Hutchings 69

from At Home and Abroad / Bayard Taylor 72

from Mammoth Tree from California / Exhibition Pamphlet 85

from Hunting Big Redwoods / John Muir 88

Yosemite, Emerson, and the Sequoias / John Muir 99

from Kaweah: How and Why the Colony Died / Burnette G. Haskell 104

The Coast Redwoods

from Lure of Humboldt Bay Region / L. K. Wood 123

from Staging in the Mendocino Redwoods / Ninetta Eames 133

A Mendocino Memory / Edward Markham 140

from The Silverado Squatters / Robert Louis Stevenson 144

from Romantic California / Ernest Peixotto 149

from The Valley of the Moon / Jack London 157

The Logging Camps

from The Last Redwoods / Francois Leydet 165

from In a Redwood Logging Camp / Ernest Ingersoll 171

from Women in Early Logging Camps / Anna M. Lind 182

from Wise as a Goose / Vernon Patterson 189

Portfolio

Photographing the Humboldt County Redwoods / Peter E. Palmquist

Into the Mystic

from The Lands of the Sun / Mary Austin 211

from The Travel Diary of a Philosopher / Hermann Keyserling 215

from Our Second American Adventure / Arthur Conan Doyle 219

The Beaks of Eagles / Robinson Jeffers 222

from November Grass / Judy Van Der Veer 224

from The Dharma Bums / Jack Kerouac 227

from Mountains and Rivers Without End / Gary Snyder 238

from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test / Tom Wolfe 243

from Significant Others / Armistead Maupin 246

Symbolic Mountains and Forests / Czeslaw Milosz 252

The High Embrace / William Everson 256

Saving the Remnant

from Redwoods and Reminiscences / Joseph D. Grant 261

from The Yosemite / John Muir 268

from From the Redwood Forest / Joan Dunning 271

from California Fault / Thurston Clarke 276

Planting a Sequoia / Dana Gioia 285

from From the Redwood Forest / Joan Dunning 287

Tree / Jane Hirshfield 294

from The Legacy of Luna / Julia Butterfly Hill 295

At the Foot of the Mountain / Jerry Martien 299.

ISBN:

1890771236

OCLC:

45734989