The Story of my Boyhood and Youth - by John Muir

I chose this book to get a glimpse into frontier life, not knowing that John Muir went on to form the Sierra Club and to become a hero to some environmentalists. Still, his book "The Story of my Boyhood and Youth" was a pleasant read about his boyhood years.

Muir's father immigrated from Scotland to Wisconsin, when John was just 11 years old. While the book provides a feel of frontier life, my guess is that there are better alternatives. Much of this book tells of the birds and animals that Muir delighted in learning about around his farm. Though I didn't anticipate it, I found some of the anecdotes of animal life quite interesting. While his anthropomorphism of animals is explicit, it is not off-putting by being incessant.

The last couple of chapters were a pleasant surprise, when the autobiography turned away from his farm, and spoke about him leaving home.

I listened to this book using the free audio version from Librivox.