Non-fiction review: The Singing Wilderness

 This is a classic of the genre, with the good and the bad that implies.

 

 

Title: The Singing Wilderness

Author:Sigurd F. Olson. Illustrated by Francis Lee Jaques

Publication info:Kindle edition, Knopf 2017. Originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1956. 244 pages.

Publisher's Blurb (per Goodreads):

Sigurd F. Olson was for more than thirty years a wilderness guide in the Quetico-Superior country, and no one knew with the same intimacy the mysteries of the lakes and forests of that magnificent primitive area. To the many out-of-doorsmen who canoed and portaged with him through this wilderness, he was known honorifically as the Bourgeois--as the voyageurs of old called their trusted leaders through this same region.

My Review:

As is common with classics of nature and the outdoors, this book has both aged well, and aged poorly. There is no question that it is a beautiful paeon to the author's home, the lakes and streams on the boundary between Canada and the US on the fringes of Lake Superior. His intimate knowledge of the area he loves shines through on every page, and he makes little or no effort to move his narrative beyond this region that is so evidently everything he wants or needs.

The delicate line drawings that illustrate the book are unfortunately hard to see on an e-reader, but what I could make out shows them to be an elegant match for the prose. As for that prose... as you might expect from the period, it's a bit more purple than we generally accept these days. Yet that is where the detail of the landscape and animals lies, so I didn't find it excessive at all. And as long as I focused on those elements, I loved the book.

Of course, also like so many books of this ilk and especially from a period before the late 20th Century at least, I found it unconsciously sexist. An outdoorsperson is assumed to be male, and much of what the author does is, I suspect, made possible by the scarcely-mentioned wife back home (at the cabin? or is home actually in the city? it's hard to tell) caring for the equally scarcely-mentioned child or children.

That aside, however, it's a lovely book.

My Recommendation:

If this is the sort of thing you like--a detailed and deeply personal look at a landscape--it will more than reward your time in reading it.

FTC Disclosure: I checked The Singing Wilderness out of my library and received nothing from the writer or publisher in exchange for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."