Angry and anguished ... Occasionally, McNally loads the dice. As he became famous, Muir acquired famous friends, like the American Museum of Natural History’s Henry Fairfield Osborn, who promulgated quasi-scientific white-supremacist views. Did Muir support these views? "Muir never commented one way or another," McNally concedes. "Likely he more or less agreed with them." It’s not a charge that would stand up in court ... Still, Cast Out of Eden is a convincing, corrective portrait of a revered but flawed man, and of a movement’s original sins.
Chronicling Muir’s life in detail, the book does an able job of exposing the hypocrisy behind Muir’s philosophies ... But its generous coverage of the many paths that Muir took in his life also somewhat mutes his Yosemite National Park and Sierra Club triumphs, which become but two turning points in a lifetime that included many.
McNally is a fluid writer, and Cast Out of Eden moves along at a brisk pace. But the author’s claim that this story is untold is a bit of a stretch ... Others may chafe at the relentlessness with which McNally prosecutes his case, and especially its implications of guilt by association.
