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About
Writer, teacher, and adventurer Kurt Caswell has spent his adult life canoeing, hiking, and pedaling his way toward a deeper understanding of our vast and varied world. Getting to Grey Owl: A Man's Journey across Four Continents chronicles over twenty years of Caswell's travels as he buys a rug in Morocco, rides a riverboat in China, attends a bullfight in Spain, climbs four mountains in the United Kingdom, and backpacks a challenging route through Iceland's wild Hornstrandir Peninsula. Writing in the tradition of such visionary nomads as Hermann Hesse, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth, Caswell travels through wild and urban landscapes, as well as philosophical and ideological vistas, championing the pleasures of a wandering life. Far from the trappings of the everyday, he explores a range of ideas: the meaning of roads and pathways, the story of Cain and Abel, nomadic life and the evolution of the human animal, the role of agriculture in the making of the modern world, and the fragility of love.
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Reviews
"Kurt Caswell is an ideal traveling partner: humane, knowledgeable, and profoundly empathetic. These essays take you from Japan to Morocco to the American West, among other places, and there's not one that doesn't leave you feeling both smarter and more curious. Anyone who loves travel, whether literal or literary, will be enriched and moved by this fine book."
Tom Bissell, author of Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation
"A fine lyric nerve animates all of Caswell's prose. The work is alert, tuned in high degree to the sensory reality of place, romantic but also reflective upon its romanticisma pleasure and a consistent instruction to read."
Sven Birkerts, author of The Art of Time in Memoir