Humboldt County Historical Society
Giants in the Earth
by Peter Johnstone & Peter Palmquist
From the bookflap:
"The tallest, the most massive, the most mystical, the most threatened - California's coast redwoods and giant sequoias have always evoked superlatives, and with this anthology we can add still more. To describe the groves of redwoods and the emotions they inspire, generations of writers have had to expand their imaginations and stretch their language. In the process they have produced some of America's most stirring, thought-provoking, and eye-opening literature - and, surprisingly, some of its most varied.
"The selections in this book range from tales of American Indians who saw these trees as ancient and permanent parts of their world to the anguished pleas of contemporary activists who have witnessed the devastation of the trees by chainsaws and sawmills; from awestruck reactions of early European explorers who wandered unexpectedly into almost indescribable grandeur to the roiling tales of loggers and sawyers. In a variety of forms - myth, poetry, fiction, essay, diatribe and more - Giants in the Earth presents multiple views of one of the world's great treasures and explores the many ways in which we humans have interacted with it.
"The coast redwoods and the giant sequoias of California inspired an extraordinary body of writing. In Giants in the Earth, the carefully chosen words of storytellers, philosophers, poets, and journalists present an eloquent and engaging record of human history in the redwoods.
"In 1849 L.K. Woods found the redwoods of Humboldt County to be a 'dismal forest prison.' By 1883, Ernest Ingersoll was extolling the 'manly attitudes' and 'muscularly graceful motions' of lumberjacks. In The Lands of the Sun (1927), Mary Austin wrote about the incommunicable majesty of the gigantic trunks of the big trees of the Sierra Nevada. Some forty years later, Tom Wolfe brought his sixties sensibilities to the San Francisco Bay Area redwoods: 'Golden particles, brillant forest-green particles, each one picking up the light, and all shimmering and flowing like an electronic mosaic, pure California neon dust.
"From John Muir and Jack London to Joan Dunning and Armistead Maupin, and with a spectacular portfolio of historic photographs assembled by Peter Palmquist, Giants in the Earth is a stirring ode to California's most treasured asset."