Nature Shock
Getting Lost in America
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An award†‘winning environmental historian explores American history through wrenching, tragic, and sometimes humorous stories of getting lost
The human species has a propensity for getting lost. The American people, inhabiting a mental landscape shaped by their attempts to plant roots and to break free, are no exception. In this engaging book, environmental historian Jon Coleman bypasses the trailblazers so often described in American history to follow instead the strays and drifters who went missing.
From Hernando de Soto’s failed quest for riches in the American southeast to the recent trend of getting lost as a therapeutic escape from modernity, this book details a unique history of location and movement as well as the confrontations that occur when our physical and mental conceptions of space become disjointed. Whether we get lost in the woods, the plains, or the digital grid, Coleman argues that getting lost allows us to see wilderness anew and connect with generations across five centuries to discover a surprising and edgy American identity.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this contemplative and erudite study, University of Notre Dame professor Coleman (Vicious: Wolves and Men in America) discusses how different groups of people have related to, and lost their way in, the United States' vast tracts of wilderness. He begins by tracing Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto's trek through what is now the American South in the 16th century, continually attacking indigenous people while getting progressively more lost, before finally dying of fever. Coleman then moves into the Pilgrim era, documenting the English settlers' attempts to carve out a society while likewise getting constantly lost in the woods, and usually rescued by the Algonquians. One of the most engaging sections focuses on Maroons escaped slaves who, while hiding from their captors, created fully functioning communities in North Carolina and Virginia swampland. Moving into the 20th century, Coleman discusses author Edward Abbey's work as a park ranger rescuing lost hikers at Arches National Monument in Moab, Utah, while, ironically, urging readers to "get lost, sunburnt, stranded, drowned, eaten by bears, buried under avalanches." Today, he suggests, Americans would do well to remember, for all their sophisticated digital navigational devices, the helplessness that people once felt in the woods. Coleman's work will fascinate readers with its look at the place of wilderness in American history.
