A biography of a place, a life of the Adirondacks . . . irresistible.” —James Gorman, The New York Times Book Review John Bert Elle
Economics, politics and human folly play as large a role in this history of the Adirondacks as do preservation of species or natural habitats. Noting that since Europeans arrived on the continent, the 'meaning and value of `wilderness' has been in flux,' journalist Schneider focuses in his first book on what people have done to the vast region now comprising the Adirondacks Park. Here people have hunted for subsistence and trapped furs for huge global markets; fought military battles and speculated on real estate; built dams, mines, farms, sawmills and railroads; sought refuge from urban ills. The region inspired huge contradictions: 'I once saw one of our neighbors in full evening dress and bedecked with diamonds paddling a canoe... en route to a dinner at the Vanderbilts,' remembered one summer resident. Schneider's anecdotal approach highlights ironies that still define the region today. Residents and environmentalists continue to seek compromises on logging, trapping and zoning, with uncertain results. Schneider weaves engaging first-person accounts of such issues into his fascinating, if sometimes too digressive, history, effectively showing the problems facing those charged with the mission of preserving the wilderness. The book is well illustrated with b&w archival photos and prints, as well as two regional maps...
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Journalist Schneider has written a poignant, insightful history of New York State's Adirondack region. He relates here the life and lore of these scenic mountains and lakes (Whiteface, Mt. Marcy, Fulton Chain Lakes) from the region's earliest inhabitants (Haudenosaunce/Iroquois) through the advent of Henry Hudson (1609), the Revolutionary War, abolitionists (John Brown), 19th-century homesteaders, Hudson River School artists, tuberculosis patients to Melville Dewey's Lake Placid Club, the Adirondack Mountain Club, and the present environmental conservation efforts. Schneider duly records that this once wild and untamed region has accommodated the likes of Wil Durant, Paul Smith, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Presidents B. Harrison, Coolidge, Hoover, and T. Roosevelt. It is now up to our present legislators, he notes, to preserve what remains. -- Ann E. Cohen, Rochester Public Library, New York
A crisp, filigreed history of the Adirondacks—from their beginnings in Grenville orogeny to last year's trapping harvest—from Paul Schneider, an editor at Mirabella . There is something about the Adirondacks—six million acres of forest and water and biting flies in northern New York State, half public, half private—that has drawn to it painters and scientists, hunters and trappers, the sick and weary looking for surcease, writers and philosophers in search of answers. Biologically, it sports an impressive 90 percent of the known animal species in the eastern half of the country. Spiritually, it has hosted the likes of Thoreau and Emerson ('in the wilderness we return to reason and faith'). Painters—Cole, Homer, Remington—have been inspired by its raw beauty. It has heard the ring of axe and buzz of sawmill, felt seekers of iron and lead and garnet excavate its ground. Great camps, more an embodiment of nature tamed than nature wild, but of undeniable architectural and decorative ingenuity, were built along its shores. The history of geologic thought was in part minted here, wilderness guides were mythologized here, John Brown (of Brown University) held a big claim here, and a later John Brown's body lies moldering in his grave on the small stake he owned there. And of course, there are the black flies. Any which way you look at it, the place is a gold mine. What makes Schneider's book distinctive is that he not only quarries these obvious attention-grabbers, but as well does a neat job of explicating the more mundane matters of the park, in particular the sometimes peaceful coexistence, sometimes dysfunctional marriage between private and publicnotions of the future of the parkland. For a slice of real estate that doesn't suffer from literary neglect, Schneider's contribution is a welcome, lively, and ranging consideration.
