Philip D’Anieri’s The Appalachian Trail: A Biography examines the famous hiking trail by looking at a group of people who influenced and built it. Each chapter follows a different person who impacted the history of the trail — from the father of the project, Benton MacKaye to Bill Bryson, whose book reinvigorated interest in the trail in the 1990s. This was a pleasurable listen with the perfect mixture of narrative and history. ( )

I was all prepared to be disappointed by this book when I started reading it and realized that it was not so much a biography of the Appalachian Trail as if it were a person, as I'd assumed, but more a series of very short biographies of people who played important roles in the trail's history. Were these even interesting people? Did I really want to read a bunch of stuff about who belonged to what organization that made this or that decision about the trail? Was this not, as I'd hoped, a book for the general reader (meaning me, as someone who has set foot on only a very tiny portion of the trail itself, but who has a general interest in nature and National Parks and so on), but rather one mainly for those who have a very specific interest in the topic and all its boring-to-everyone-else details?

Fortunately, I was quickly reassured by the answers to these questions. The people were, for the most part, fairly interesting, as is the way the story of the trail is told through them. Most interestingly, the author uses all of this as a way to pose a variety of complex and important questions, ones that have very much shaped the history of the trail itself (and no doubt that of a lot of other places, too). Is taking to the woods a mere recreational activity, or does it have a more spiritual component in the way it connects us to nature? Is an activity like hiking the trail best when it's a challenge for the dedicated, or when it's accessible to all? How do you balance opening up wild places to people with keeping them wild? I'm not sure there are any good and solid answers to some of these questions, but that probably just makes them more, rather than less, worth thinking about.

There's also a very nice chapter at the end where the author abandons the biographical conceit and talks about the landscape of the trail itself and his own experiences with and thoughts on hiking it.

And now I really want to get out into the woods again, dammit. It's been a while. ( )

Biography - By Way Of Biographies. This was a very interesting read, if primarily for the narrative structure D'Anieri chose in writing it. Here, the author doesn't set out to provide a "definitive history" of the Trail or the technical details of how it came to be. Instead, he profiles key players in the development of the Trail as it has come to exist now and shows how their lives and thoughts and actions proved pivotal in how the Trail got to where it is. Overall a fascinating book about a wide range of people and attitudes about the boundary of civilization and wilderness, written in a very approachable style - much like much of the Trail itself. Very much recommended. ( )