MAN ON HIS OWN

...Always you feel yourself in touch with a spacious-minded and warm-hearted human being...

...And a good many of his generalized insights which seem to me profoundly important and true in one way of understanding them, seem not at all true when understood in another...

...There is much more...

...They need sharper definition if they are not only to stir the reader's feelings but clarify his mental vision...

...In a moment he may feel again the influence of the unique remoteness from the world of strife and of the startling beauty and grandeur in the presence of which he believes a man can come to know himself and God...

...It is the positive force that requires a man to go forward even when every muscle rebels...

...I cannot imagine anyone reading it at all without learning a lot he hadn't known, or without becoming wiser and better in a most meaningful sense of those words...

...Tricks and boasting are of no account in surviving the adversities of nature...

...But the memories of this trip were so poignant that I laughed out loud when a friend who prefers a soft chair by the fire said, 'So you rode twenty miles of rough trail for six trout?' " As for taking away something like the full wealth of experience which the pages of the book can evoke, that is reserved for those who walked or rode the trails with the author...

...It is above everything a moving biographical account of an extraordinary human being's patient, intelligent, heroic, and triumphant battle to overcome physical and psychological handicaps resulting from infantile paralysis suffered in childhood...

...The same sort of criticism applies to the concluding appeal of the book for "the faith of our fathers," that "dedicates us to something bigger and more important than ourselves and our possessions," a faith for which "it would be a glory to die," a faith that rises high above all secular controversies, and all sects and schisms and religious disputes, "the faith in One who was the Creator, the Giver of Life, the Omnipotent...

...They will smile with understanding when they read: "I was too tired to describe the beauty of the scenes I had witnessed on my trip...

...Reviewed by Max C. Otto IT IS more or less true of all books that what readers get from them depends upon what they bring to them...

...Yet it will speak in particular to readers supplied with memories of escapes from city or village into the community of nature...

...And it all goes well together, idealism and realism, outspoken admiration for the persons, famous or unknown, who try to do their part to make life livable, and disdain for those who seek to grow strong by making others weak, religious faith and a sense of life's transitoriness and tragedy...

...I thought of men who by manipulation got verdicts and judgments and wealth they did not deserve . . . "Men fighting a blizzard on the plains or an angry storm at sea at once become equal...

...II This philosophy is of course neither technical nor academic...

...Is it not rather man, more richly interpreted than is frequently done, relying upon one part of nature to overcome another part...

...Yes, indeed, a reader who thinks of what he is reading may come upon plenty that he finds debatable...

...What a perfectly gorgeous time he can have by opening to any chapter...

...When man is on his own, mother's accent, father's prestige, grandma's wealth don't count...

...And what reading for the author himself...

...I thought of vain men, pacing up and down on the platform, waving their arms, filling the air waves with their noisy complaints...

...Is it possible, then, for man or any part of man to step out of the universe...

...Here is a sample of it induced by leaning against a stiff wind blowing over the top of Old Snowy and recollecting destructive forces driving through the world of affairs: "As I stood in the cold gale peering into the deep canyons, the froth of life seemed to blow away...

...It reflects the physical landscape, the social environment, the ambitions and aspirations of active men and women...

...Matched with such thoughts are appreciative portrayals of people of intellectual and moral stature...

...Poverty, wealth, accidents of birth, social standing, races were immaterial...

...those who climbed the heights, fished the streams, watched the sun go down behind snow-capped mountains, and sat about camp-fires with him, talking far into the night while "the long dark fingers of the pine or the fir reached higher and higher in the sky as the fire died down, and the stars drew closer to the high shoulders of the Cascades...

...But the book is much besides a record of what the boy and later the man saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt in one of the magnificent and fortunately still "unimproved" wilderness regions of the United States...

...Nowhere is there a trace of artificiality or littleness of spirit...

...The fact that a person lived on one side of the railroad tracks rather than on the other made no difference...

...In the present case I had to give up trying...

...And because it is so much else it is a book for everyone...

...The same was true when they walk the trails or climb the mountains...

...There is information about foods, cooking, camping and woodcraft...

...I thought of clever men gaining advantages by trick and cunning...

...It has fallen to my lot to review quite a number of books...

...There are chapters on fishing, especially trout fishing, which show the author having the kind of fun he evidently enjoys most...

...It is more than what we call guts...

...There are stories of Indians, sheepherders, forest rangers...

...I have never found it easy, and more often than not impossible, to gather the substance of an author's work into the limits assigned...

...I am myself by no means so sure as the author is of the "live dangerously" doctrine, nor so convinced that the great challenge of life "is in the discovery of the outermost limits of one's own endurance...

...And it is an unpretentious setting forth of a wise and noble philosophy of life, based upon keen observation of natural phenomena, upon sensitive appreciation of human motivation, and wide contact with men and events...

...Of Men and Mountains is one of those rarer books whose virtues have to be discovered by the reader for himself, slowly, meditatively, at intervals, to the great good of his mind and heart and of his relations to his fellow men...

...Whosoever hath, to him shall be given...

...Of Men and Mountains relates some of the story—working in fields and orchards, riding the rods, being held up by train crews and yard bulls, etc.—of the struggle to get an education and a law degree...

...For instance, this thought about mountain climbing: "It is spirit against matter, the power of the soul to drive the legs above fatigue and to push an exhausted body without whimper...

...It is man against the mountain—finite man against the universe...

...A flood of exciting recollections will carry him off to the high peaks, the alpine meadows, the forest solitudes, the choice companionships which from his boyhood onward entered intimately into the making of his personality and his outlook on the world...

...Everywhere there is response to beauty, whether met with on a tiny or a stupendous scale...

...But- it is unusually true of this story of physical and spiritual adventure in the Pacific Northwest...