A metal file slips and pierces a young factory supervisor's eye, plunging him into six weeks of total darkness. When his sight returns, he abandons industrial society entirely and sets off on a thousand-mile walk to the Gulf of Mexico. That moment of blindness is the crucible of John Muir's entire story.

This deep dive looks past the polished monument of the father of the national parks to reveal a brilliant but irregular college student, a draft dodger, a reluctant writer, and a deeply complex figure now at the center of intense cultural debates. We follow him from a brutal Scottish-American childhood to the granite walls of Yosemite and the heartbreaking loss of Hetch Hetchy.

• How his strict father's forced Bible memorization transferred into Muir's worship of nature as the book of God
• His vindicated glacier theory of Yo ...