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Overview
In the foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winner John McPhee, we dip into the experience of canoeing, from the thrilling challenges of childhood camp expeditions to the moving reflections of long-time paddlers. The pages that follow are filled with historical photographs and artwork, authors Neuzil and Sims describe the dugout and birch bark craft from their first known appearance through the exploration of Canada by fur traders, to the recreational movements that promoted all-wood and wood-and-canvas canoes. Modern materials such as aluminum, fiberglass, and plastic expanded participation and connected canoeists with emerging environmental movements.
Finally, Canoes lets us hear the voices of past paddlers like Alexander Mackenzie, the first European to cross North America, using birch bark and dugout canoes a decade before Lewis and Clark went overland, Henry Thoreau, Eric Sevareid, Edwin Tappan Adney, and others. Their stories are a tribute to the First Peoples who, 500 or 1,000 or even 5,000 years ago, built a craft designed to such perfection that it has plied the waters fundamentally unchanged ever since.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780816681174 |
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Publisher: | University of Minnesota Press |
Publication date: | 11/15/2016 |
Series: | PostHumanities |
Pages: | 336 |
Sales rank: | 537,453 |
Product dimensions: | 8.10(w) x 10.10(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Norman Sims is a retired honors professor from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a past president of the International Association for Literary Journalism Studies. This is his sixth book. A longtime whitewater canoeist and an active member of both the Appalachian Mountain Club and the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association, Sims has a small collection of antique Morris wood-and-canvas canoes.
John McPhee is the author of more than thirty books, including Encounters with the Archdruid (1971), The Survival of the Bark Canoe (1975), and Coming into the Country (1977). Since 1963, his articles and all of his books have appeared in The New Yorker magazine. He received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Annals of the Former World in 1999. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
Table of Contents
ContentsForeword: Scenes from a Life in CanoesJohn McPhee
Introduction
1. Dugout Canoes Napoleon Sanford: The Important Thing is You and the Wood
2. Birch Bark Canoes Elm Bark Canoes The Oldest Birch Bark Canoe
3. Fur Trade and ExplorationThe Algonquin Fur Trade Frances Anne Hopkins
4. All-Wood Canoes Jule Fox Marshall
5. Wood-and-Canvas Canoes Tom Seavey: More Than Just the World Canoe Sails
6. The Rise of the Synthetic CanoeCanoe PatentsCanoes in WartimeSquare-stern Canoes
7. Canoes and the Human-Powered Movement Paddles Canoe Packs
8. Journeys: Canoe Tripping
AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex