Yosemite Falls is my favorite Daniel Duane book, and that’s saying something from the man who wrote Caught Inside. It’s a memoir of a Sierra boyhood spent worshipping in the Muir way—backpacking, skiing, climbing granite with a father who cast a long shadow—braided with the harder history behind the postcard: the dispossession, the erasures, the great men who turn out to be human. What’s energizing is that Duane never stops loving the place even as he reckons with its darker moments. He climbs the same rock, hauls his daughters up it, keeps the faith even as he tries to correct it. His writing is fast, funny, salty, self-implicating, and generous, and he’s smart enough to land the ending without a tidy redemption.
Yosemite Falls: Reckoning with California History and the Gospel of John Muir