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Nature General

Wilderness Called Home

Dispatches From The Wild Heart Of Canada

by (author) Charles Wilkins

Publisher
Penguin Group Canada
Initial publish date
Oct 2002
Category
General
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780140297195
    Publish Date
    Oct 2002
    List Price
    $22

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Description

Canadians connect with the wilderness in an endless number of subtle or impassioned ways: as sea captains, mountaineers, artists, eco-warriors, rafters, nudists, and industrialists?or simply as canoeists or cottage dwellers.

In April 2000, Charles Wilkins set off from his Lake Superior home on travels that took him coast to coast: aboard a working freighter on the Great Lakes, then overland to the west, at times on foot in the mountains and rainforests and along the sea coasts. His travels culminated in an intense two-week sojourn alone in the wilderness of northern Canada.

This compelling blend of travel narrative and portraiture, of unexpected exotica and humour, brings to life Wilkins's discoveries about the nature of our attachments to the land and waters. Come into the sauna with the nudist members of the Traditional Finnish Sauna Society of Thunder Bay. Meet Winston Books, an eccentric Toronto engineer with a bizarre lifestyle and infectious passion for the night sky. Share the tensions and energy of the captain and crew of the freighter MV Paterson. And encounter the Lawson family who, despite their 19th-century living habits, have fomented a 21st-century ecological revolution on Clayoquot Sound.

A Wilderness Called Home helps make sense of the wilds around us?the wilds that are our Canadian home, no matter how jaded and urban we become.

About the author

Charles Wilkins wrestled Don Starkell's mountainous diary into the classic work of adventure travel Paddle to the Amazon, praised by The New York Times Book Review as "a model expeditionary journal." The winner of three National Magazine Awards, two American Magazine Association awards and The Gregory Clark Outdoor Writing Award, he has also been a finalist for the Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Trillium Book Prize and the Toronto Book Award. His acclaimed non-fiction includes In the Land of Long Fingernails, The Circus at the Edge of the Earth and Walk To New York, and he is the co-author with Gordie Howe of the bestseller After the Applause. He divides his time between Thunder Bay and Muskoka, Ontario.

Charles Wilkins' profile page