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Keeping Up With John Muir as He Follows His Bliss

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

A THOUSAND MILE WALK TO THE GULF; MY FIRST SUMMER IN THE SIERRA; TRAVELS IN ALASKA by John Muir (Mariner, $10 each, paper).

Backpacker magazine’s annual “gear” issue is on the stands, and outdoor types nationwide are ogling 212 pages of 3-pound dome tents, compact water filters and lightweight hiking boots.

Just after the Civil War the young Scotsman John Muir traipsed off from Indianapolis toward the Gulf of Mexico “by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way” he could find. He didn’t have Vibram or Gore-Tex, but his accounts of his travels over the next 30 years serve as perennial inspiration for adventurers--even those who carry his words in nylon backpacks with built-in hydration systems.

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Mariner’s reissue of these classics, with introductory comments by nature photographer Galen Rowell, nature writer David Foster Wallace and newsman Peter Jenkins, are essential additions to the library of anyone who even just gawks through a windshield at mountains or meadows.

Fired with enthusiasm by the works of Emerson and Thoreau (and, clearly, deep internal passion as well), Muir jotted impressions as he hiked, usually solo, through an American landscape that was already succumbing to the shortsightedness of a nation on a civilizing spree.

The bliss Muir later experienced hiking California’s Sierra Nevada range led to the creation of Yosemite National Park and the modern conservation movement. By the time he got to Alaska, just 12 years after the U.S. purchased it from Russia, it, too, was at risk.

Rhapsodic descriptions of nature are Muir’s forte. But he’s not bad on the human world either. He describes Alaska’s Wrangell Island settlement, for instance, as “a lawless draggle of wooden huts and houses, built in crooked lines, wrangling around the boggy shore of the island for a mile or so in the general form of the letter S, without the slightest subordination to the points of the compass or to building laws of any kind.”

But don’t mistake the Calvinist’s tone for the humorless scolding too often adopted by his environmental progeny. In further describing Wrangell, for instance, he flashes his understated wit: “The domestic animals were represented by chickens, a lonely cow, a few sheep, and hogs of a breed well calculated to deepen and complicate the mud of the streets.”

LOS ANGELES, THE ROUGH GUIDE by Jeff Dickey (The Rough Guides, $14.95, paper).

A new release from this ambitious and respected imprint is always good news, and this one is so thorough and insightful that even Southern Californians may want to keep copies in their glove boxes. Sure, the author leans toward a tourist’s perspective, paying more attention, for instance, to Disneyland than to local fly fishing streams or used bookstores. But his informed, dispassionate approach to the maligned and mythologized place we call home is as admirable as it is rare.

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Boxes highlight past personalities (Henry Gaylord Wilshire, The Times’ Harrison Gray Otis) and current events (the Ballona wetlands controversy, mass transit problems).

The author does take a misstep or two: “You’ll have to look hard,” he says, for food from parts of Latin America other than Mexico. But most other guidebooks are far more blundering in their take on the City of Angels.

This concise overview of Los Angeles history, from the Chumash to Mayor Richard Riordan, is a swell bonus.

Quick trip

FRANCE, CONTEMPORARY ART AND ARCHITECTURE HANDBOOK, by Sidra Stich (Art SITES, $19.95 paper).

Forget the Louvre’s Renaissance masterpieces. This guide focuses its attention on the great museum’s I.M. Pei-designed glass pyramid renovation. And in its pages Roy Lichtenstein trumps Toulouse-Lautrec. A San Francisco-based art historian, Stich casts a wide research net over this art-appreciative nation and offers a well-organized, well-written take on where to encounter the best painting, sculpture, architecture and film of the last few decades.

Books to Go appears the second and fourth Sunday of every month.

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