AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2020
There’s never been a better time to indulge in John Muir’s inspiring observations of California’s most iconic wilderness. Crafted over the two years that Muir lived in a tiny cabin alongside Yosemite Creek, around 1870, the work was originally intended as a guidebook to what would become Yosemite National Park. Nick McArdle’s understated narration is intoxicatingly relaxing. A Scotsman, like Muir, McArdle allows the author’s words to wash over listeners like a walk in the woods. Muir leaves no detail in the park unnoticed, and McArdle imparts the author’s spring-in-his-step enthusiasm for every encounter with the park’s flora, fauna, and geology. Muir’s spirit of discovery and magical descriptions live on in this beautiful narrative trek through an awe-inspiring ecosystem.

This new recording gives eloquent expression to the patron saint of wilderness conservation. Although the great naturalist seems a quintessentially American voice, his accents were those of his native Scotland, as are those of the well-cast narrator McCardle, whose gently accented speech reinforces the author’s own sense of being a strange traveler in a wondrous new land. When he arrived in the Yosemite Valley at the age of thirty, Muir experienced something akin to a religious conversion, and he would come to stay there for a decade. Muir struggled to craft writing that captured his reverence for nature, and McCardle takes great care to read at a leisurely pace, giving Muir’s descriptions room to breathe, and to carry the listener along with each deft stroke of his picturesque prose. This is especially evident in the often spell-binding early chapters, as the now-aged Muir recalls his first encounters with the valley, his eyes cast ever-upward in devout rapture. More prosaic later sections are enlivened with moments of dangerous encounters. This production makes a beautiful introduction to a great philosopher of nature, and to the world that shaped him.