Nature Shock: Getting Lost in America

by Jon T. Coleman

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300255867
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	08/12/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Jon T. Coleman is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of two books, including Vicious: Wolves and Men in America, winner of the W. Turrentine Jackson Award from the Western History Association.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Want to Get Lost? 1

1 Brutal Symmetry 13

2 Helpful Woods and Violent Waters 52

3 Children of the Revolution 93

4 Homing 134

5 Dead-Certain Mental Compass 171

6 Keep Your Head 211

7 Male Pattern Trail Loss 242

Epilogue: Disconnect 285

Notes 297

Index 331

Editorial Reviews

"Fascinating. . . . Underlying . . . is a deep belief in the importance of collaboration and cooperation between humans and their environments, as well as between humans and other humans."—Robert Macfarlane, New York Review of Books
 

"Contemplative and erudite. . . . Coleman’s work will fascinate readers with its look at the place of wilderness in American history."—Publishers Weekly

“Nature Shock is original, compelling, deeply researched, and expansively written, showcasing Jon Coleman’s signature wit and verve.”—Louis Warren, author of God's Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

“In an ambitious continental frame extending from the sixteenth century to the present, Nature Shock carries us through the history of getting lost in America.  This is an unconventional and deeply compelling history of American empire, nation-making, and identity seen not from the typical centers of power but rather from the unstable edges.”—Samuel Truett, author of Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

“From the wanderings of Spanish explorers to the age of smartphones, Jon Coleman’s Nature Shock artfully explores ‘getting lost’ in America and why it should matter to all of us.”—William Wyckoff, author of How to Read the American West: A Field Guide

"No doubt about it, we are a nation of lost souls; in this book for our times, Jon Coleman explains brilliantly how that happened, and its consequences."—Thomas P. Slaughter, author of Exploring Lewis and Clark

“In this sweeping work, Jon T. Coleman traces what it has meant to be lost over the centuries, and introduces the remarkable individuals who experienced such wilderness. The result is an illuminating and inspirational rethinking of nature and social connection.”—Louis P. Masur, Rutgers University

From the Publisher

2020-06-02
A professor of history at Notre Dame examines the phenomenon of getting lost in the face of technologies meant to keep us on the path.

Coleman opens with an only-in-America vignette, describing a company that places clients in remote places with the aim of their “finding their true selves in bespoke isolation.” Getting lost in the woods in search of self-discovery has possibilities both positive and negative: One can become like Kerouac in The Dharma Bums or Piggy in Lord of the Flies. As the author discusses, there’s getting lost, and then there’s getting lost, as with Hernando de Soto and Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish conquistadors, or the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who marveled at the fact that a Huron guide assigned to him “knew how to find again the place from which he started so well that it was something very remarkable.” Coleman sometimes ventures into arid academic territory, and his excurses into the howling wilderness of the Puritans and pioneers have been done better by other scholars, such as Perry Miller and Henry Nash Smith. Still, he makes a number of salient points. For example, early advocates of camping that was recreational rather than required willingly put themselves in harm’s way even as the development of managed campgrounds reduced that danger while replacing it with a “feeling of detachment [that] was an amenity, and clients and managers pushed the limits of safety to conjure sensations of being out-there, on the edge of the known world….Visitors accepted risks because they expected nature to blow their minds—in a healthy, sublime way.” The payoff for moderns? Perhaps respite from the flood of information that washes over us, to say nothing of growing a stronger hippocampus, which is never a bad idea.

Worth a look for fans of Thoreau, Solnit, and other proponents of aimless wandering.

Kirkus Reviews