A paddling classic back in print with new maps, photos, details, and afterword. Christine Jerome walked into the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake, NY, and promptly fell in love with a 9-foot, 10½-pound canoe named the Sairy Gamp. More than a century before, in 1883, the Sairy Gamp had been paddled and portaged through the Adirondacks by a sixty-one-year-old writer named George Washington Sears (his pen name was Nessmuk). The more Jerome learned about Sears, the more she wanted to follow his route, despite her lack of camping or canoeing experience. In August 1990 she embarked in a 9-foot canoe made of Kevlar and, with her husband, John, accompanying her in a slightly larger boat, set off to retrace Sears’s journey. An Adirondack Passage is part social history, part natural history, part biography of Sears, and part chronicle of a voyage. Summer turns to fall while the Jeromes make their way north, through sunshine and storms, down cottage-lined lakes and lonely wild streams. Gusting winds bully their light canoes and by mid-September the days are colder and shorter; but the longer they paddle, the more attached they become to the beauty around them. Canada geese fly overhead, monarch butterflies flutter southward, and on the larger lakes, young loons gather for their first migration to the sea. Along the way the author pauses to tell us what Sears saw when he passed by, and what happened to his favorite haunts in the ensuing century. As the history of the region unfolds we meet hermits and millionaires, hunting guides and society women, hotelkeepers and dime-novel writers, and one lost dancing bear. Christine Jerome has given us a memorable wilderness experience that readers who have never lifted a paddle will find fascinating and invigorating. This new release from Breakaway Books is the third edition, revised and updated with extra photos, maps, and a new afterword. PRAISE FOR AN ADIRONDACK PASSAGE “A fine piece of work and a great delight. ” —John McPhee “An enchanting record of a canoe trip.” —The New Yorker “A writer of fine and watertight prose. . . . An Adirondack Passage is uncategorizable—at once history, naturalism, sociology, and a love story—but unfailingly graceful.” —Boston Globe “Personal, witty, and thoughtful—one of the best introductions to the area ever produced.” —Audubon “As refreshing a break from the busyness of life as I’ve come across in awhile.” —Newsday “The writing . . . is a constant pleasure. Jerome has a style that suits her subject, quiet and gentle as a paddle in still water. She delivers her lore with wit and whimsy, with fine descriptions and without shrill preaching or righteous posturing.” —Smithsonian “The closest thing to a national nonfiction best-seller that the region has seen in ages, and deservedly so.” —Adirondack Life “A captivating account. . . . She takes us into a world of hermits and millionaires, of wild streams and glorious mountain scenery.” —Publishers Weekly “A delightful tale. . . . An informative, readable adventure whose history and environmental lessons are taught well.” —Library Journal

The author follows a trip through the Adirondack Park taken a century earlier by George Washington Sears.

"She's all my fancy painted her, she's lovely, she is light. She waltzes on the waves by day, and rests with me at night. But I had nothing to do with her painting. The man who built her did that. And I commence with the canoe because that is about the first thing you need on entering the Northern Wilderness. "—Nessmuk Thus opened Nessmuk's first commissioned "letter" for Forest and Stream in 1880. For years thereafter, George Washington Sears, under the penname Nessmuk, contributed a glorious series of pieces on canoeing the Adirondacks, exploring rivers and streams, climbing the many mountains and peaks, and chronicling his long relationship with one of the greatest canoe builders, J. Henry Rushton. These letters brought Nessmuk fame and served to increase the magazine's circulation tremendously. They hold a special place in wilderness writing and unfold in vivid detail the pageantry of the waterways from a bygone era.

Thinkers and activists from many orientations and traditions are now coming together to explore ways to reconstitute rites of passage as a form of community healing for our public and personal ills. Crossroads is a comprehensive collection of over fifty cutting-edge writings on diverse aspects of the transition to adulthood. "In no uncertain terms, Crossroads opens our eyes to our responsibility to the adolescents who are now growing up without sacred rituals and hence without knowledge of spiritual roots in their culture. Many of the writers have first-hand experience and first-rate ideas of how to transform this cultural crisis. Crossroads also challenges us to integrate our own inner adolescent. Piercing insight with realistic hope " -- Marlon Woodman The Ravaged Bridegroom

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER More than ONE MILLION copies sold A TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick A New York Times Notable Book, and Chosen by Oprah Daily, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Bill Gates and Barack Obama as a Best Book of the Year “Wise and wildly entertaining . . . permeated with light, wit, youth.” —The New York Times Book Review “A classic that we will read for years to come.” —Jenna Bush Hager, Read with Jenna book club “Fantastic. Set in 1954, Towles uses the story of two brothers to show that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as we might hope.” —Bill Gates “A real joyride . . . elegantly constructed and compulsively readable.” —NPR The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes. “Once again, I was wowed by Towles’s writing—especially because The Lincoln Highway is so different from A Gentleman in Moscow in terms of setting, plot, and themes. Towles is not a one-trick pony. Like all the best storytellers, he has range. He takes inspiration from famous hero’s journeys, including The Iliad, The Odyssey, Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn, and Of Mice and Men. He seems to be saying that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as an interstate highway. But, he suggests, when something (or someone) tries to steer us off course, it is possible to take the wheel.” – Bill Gates

"Read it, please. Straight through to the end. Whatever else you were planning to do next, nothing could be more important." —Barbara Kingsolver Twenty years ago, with The End of Nature, Bill McKibben offered one of the earliest warnings about global warming. Those warnings went mostly unheeded; now, he insists, we need to acknowledge that we've waited too long, and that massive change is not only unavoidable but already under way. Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth. That new planet is filled with new binds and traps. A changing world costs large sums to defend—think of the money that went to repair New Orleans, or the trillions it will take to transform our energy systems. But the endless economic growth that could underwrite such largesse depends on the stable planet we've managed to damage and degrade. We can't rely on old habits any longer. Our hope depends, McKibben argues, on scaling back—on building the kind of societies and economies that can hunker down, concentrate on essentials, and create the type of community (in the neighborhood, but also on the Internet) that will allow us to weather trouble on an unprecedented scale. Change—fundamental change—is our best hope on a planet suddenly and violently out of balance.

The definitive guide to the history and makers of Adirondack guideboats