Review

I had the excellent essay collection A Mile in Her Boots: Women who Work in the Wild (edited by Jennifer Bové) on my wish list for a while and got it as a holiday gift. I'd previously read (and reviewed here) her other collection Wild With Child: Adventures of Families in the Great Outdoors.

I received Wild with Child: Adventures of Families in the Great Outdoors as a birthday gift. It's a very readable collection of short essays and personal narratives by parents about exploring nature with their children. The stories run the gamut from rock climbing and hunting with pre-schoolers to camping and climbing trees with almost-grown teenagers, and everything in between. The quality of the writing is uniformly high, unusual for an anthology. Most of the families represented are of the two parents of opposite genders variety, but the children are boys and girls of all ages. On the author/parent side, women outnumber men about two to one. A common theme is that being outdoors with your children is a two-way experience, adults learn as much from children as children learn from adults, and often the child we introduced to nature eventually surpasses us in knowledge. Wild with Child is an enjoyable read that really brings home the endless variety and range of ways to enjoy outdoor adventures with children of all ages. To quote the introduction, "There are wonders waiting and memories to be made."

Although this is not an advice or how-to book, there is a short list of recommended books and websites for outdoor families at the end.