GUARDIANS OF THE VALLEY
“It’s a brave thing, to write about John Muir. First, you run the risk of contrasting your own writing with his, and whose can compare?….Thankfully, Dean King’s poetry is a match for Muir’s…compelling…a book about the power of storytelling….We see through this book the immense power of language to sway, the ability for selectively chosen words to convey awe and power, resentment and raw anger, to change the minds of lawmakers and tourists alike.” —The New York Times Book Review
With budget and staff cuts being made to our already underfunded National Parks, now more than ever our care and advocacy for these special places is essential.
The efforts of John Muir and his activist editor Robert Underwood Johnson to preserve and protect our natural places while urging all Americans to immerse themselves in them for physical and spiritual health stand as an inspiration never more relevant than today.
Through this book, I invite you to be moved by their example, to walk a trail through the woods, and to provide another voice for your nature — your own…
— Dean
Finalist PEN/Weld Award for Biography and Library of Virginia People’s Choice Award
“A book for anyone in love with Yosemite, California history, and our natural world.”
—San Francisco Chronicle, Most Anticipated Books of 2023
“Writer Dean King, drawing extensively on the Muir-Johnson letters, tells the story of the work they did together and the admiration they bore for each other, crafting prose as absorbing as one of Muir’s articles in the Century.” —Natural History Magazine
“Sparkling history. . . . King vividly chronicles Muir’s evolution from 'self-styled hobo' to forceful activist, goaded and nurtured by the 'urbane' Johnson, and weaves in intriguing vignettes . . . as well as rhapsodic descriptions of the Sierra Nevada landscape.” —Publishers Weekly
Books by Dean King
About Dean
Dean King is an award-winning author of ten nonfiction books. Dean relishes the adventures involved in making history come to life while at the same time diligently searching out the truth and turning up new historical detail. While researching his national bestseller Skeletons on the Zahara, he crossed the Sahara on camels and in Land Rovers. He trekked the Long March trail in the Snowy Mountains of Western China while researching Unbound, and was shot at in Appalachia while writing The Feud. For his most recent book, Guardians of the Valley, Dean traveled to John Muir’s boyhood homes in Dunbar, Scotland, and in rural Wisconsin and spent months roaming Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada.