Book tour, Portland TV, beer, trail mix, and more: Under The Stars update for July

  Hello, everyone. I hope you are taking advantage of the nice weather and having a good old time exploring the mountains, meadows, swamps, cane breaks, estuaries, dells and dales and dogwoods of America. The public lands belong to you. Take advantage. Get out those blue tarps, those panniers, and those bear kegs. And you don’t need to go far afield to experience nature. I love to explore the hinterlands of my own  town — the greenbelts, the coastal meadows, the sloughs and oak thickets. Thank you for sending me pictures of my new book, Under The Stars, hanging out in America’s campgrounds. Lately I’ve been so busy, I’ve only taken shorter camping trips to places like Napa and Big Sur. Beautiful country! Word is still getting out about this website. Until recently, the readership demographic consisted, overwhelmingly, of my mother in law at this point. Other folks have been…

Coming tomorrow: an Under The Stars interactive “camper’s page” on Facebook

Hello campers and friends and camping friends. Just wanted to let you know that my publisher (Henry Holt) is going to go live tomorrow with an Under The Stars interactive page that will allow you to send in camping photos, photos of Under The Stars in far-flung locations (or near-flung locations), camping stories and other things. They’re calling it an Under The Stars “fan page” but I’m thinking of it as a camping page or virtual campground of sorts. Thank you again for your support, by the way; I really appreciate it. .  

Beer, trail mix, and Under The Stars: July 12th at the Booksmith in San Francisco

Friends, I’ve had plenty of readings before. Readings in dive bars. Readings in the middle of the woods, where all the audience members were dehydrated and lost. But this upcoming reading at the Booksmith — marking the centennial of the National Park Service –– will be like a virtual car camping experience.   Because of fire regulations, I don’t think we’ll be able to build an actual bonfire at the Booksmith, a wonderful San Francisco bookstore, but there will be  campfire stories, trail mix, and  barley-malt drinks. Anyway, the fun will take place at July 12, 730 p.m. sharp. I will read from two sections of the book, which takes you through the wild and woolly history of American camping from the chilly heights of Whitney to the swamps of the Everglades. I will answer any questions you have, and we will hang out, and reflect on campouts past, present and future….

Happy Father’s Day, campers

Long before I started working on Under The Stars, I marked every Father’s Day by buying a piece of camping gear or paraphernalia: a flashlight, a bottle of bug spray, or an inedible chunk of freeze-dried Neapolitan ice cream. I engaged in this ritual because my father got me into wilderness camping at a young age. Considering how much he’s influenced my complicated love for camping, you’d think my dad was raised in the middle of the countryside. Actually, he’s a slum kid from the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was a child during the Great Depression.  The first camping he ever witnessed was the desperate or ‘needful’ kind on the edge of his neighborhood. At the height of the Great Depression there were sprawling “Hoovervilles” below the Williamsburg Bridge, rows of shacks made of tin sheets and cardboard. Campfires smoldered along the East River. One day, some local…

“Dan White takes on that strange American behavior we call ‘camping’ in ‘Under the Stars’” — feature story in Santa Cruz Sentinel

  Dear campers and readers: Here is a just-published news-feature story about my upcoming book (which launches just six days from now.) By the way,  I so appreciate your detailed reviews and commentary. I just want to thank all those who have taken the time to share their thoughts on the book with the rest of the world. I appreciate the way that you are taking the time to delve into this. Somehow you’re deepening my understanding of experiences that I’ve lived through and written about, which is really extraordinary. In some ways this has been such a hard year for me. The loss of my father in late March weighs very heavily in my heart every day. But I am hoping that this book will sustain his memory, especially if it continues to find an audience out there; after all, he is the one who gave me my camping…