1998. 368 pp, 40 photos. The Adirondack wilderness is the ultimate symbol of the importance of wilderness to today's world. It has a rich and fascinating history. The vast Adirondack region of upstate New York is very much a wilderness, but one ringed by towns and close enough to major cities that it is heavily traveled. Long viewed as a natural playground, the Adirondacks were a favorite haunt of transcendentalist philosophers Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, of conservationists such as Franklin Burroughs and Theodore Roosevelt, of bohemians and hippies, and of back-to-the-land types. Still wild enough that wolf reintroduction has been proposed for the Adirondacks, the territory remains a powerfully inspiring place of refuge and recreation. Paul Schneider tells the story of this river-laced, forested land with imagination and a flair for just the right anecdote. Journalist Schneider has written a poignant, insightful history of New York State's Adirondack region. He relates here the life and lore of these scenic mountains and lakes (Whiteface, Mt. Marcy, Fulton Chain Lakes) from the region's earliest inhabitants (Haudenosaunce/Iroquois) through the advent of Henry Hudson (1609), the Revolutionary War, abolitionists (John Brown), 19th-century homesteaders, Hudson River School artists, tuberculosis patients to Melville Dewey's Lake Placid Club, the Adirondack Mountain Club, and the present environmental conservation efforts. Schneider duly records that this once wild and untamed region has accommodated the likes of Wil Durant, Paul Smith, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Presidents B. Harrison, Coolidge, Hoover, and T. Roosevelt. It is now up to our present legislators, he notes, to preserve what remains. Hardcover, New condition with dust jacket.
