Product Description

Graham Mackintosh has done it again! With his characteristic humor and sense of wonder still undimmed, this beloved author brings his fans another armchair adventure in Baja California. This time, Mackintosh has substituted depth for breadth, exploring multiple aspects of just one area, the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir. His enthusiastic curiosity ranges from world history to natural history, and he writes with verve about everything from surviving thunderstorms to the experience of hearing about 9/11/01 on a small radio in a remote mountain tent. But Mackintosh is at his best writing about relationships, particularly his evolving relationship with his canine companions. His honesty, his maturing spirituality, and his easy way with words all combine to make "Nearer My Dog To Thee" a wonderful addition to the literature of Baja California. [Judy Goldstein Botello, Author of The Other Side]

The Sierra San Pedro Mártir is Baja California's "sky island," where an ancient forest seems to touch the stars. At last, in Graham Mackintosh, this unique, breathtaking, and alas, endangered place has its bard.

Nearer My Dog To Thee is a both charming and important page-turner of a book. When I put it down, I felt as if I had spent four glorious months in the Sierra San Pedro Mártir myself. And what an adventure it was! Shooting stars, packs of coyotes, a soaring eagle, thunderclaps and crashing trees... I learned about mushrooms and condors, stars and comets and the planet Mars, and best of all, I "met" Pedro, a rescued mutt from Rosarito, and Penny, the cute-as-a-button little coyote-chasing terrier.

This book will delight anyone who loves Baja California, its high sierra, and most of all, dogs. Graham Mackintosh shows us that, indeed, God is dog spelled backwards.

[C.M. Mayo, Author of Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico.]

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #774152 in Books
• Published on: 2003-11
• Binding: Paperback
• 290 pages

Bill Evarts, Author of Torrey Pines: Landscape and Legacy
From his base camp tucked amongst aspens and pines...Mackintosh [brings] his readers a profound sense of the sacred...

Gene Kira, Author of The Baja Catch and King of the Moon
Mackintosh goes to the mountain! Baja's peripatetic author at his best.

Ann O'Neil Author of Loreto, Baja California: First Mission and Capital of Spanish California
Funny and full of fascinating information, Graham Mackintosh has beautifully brought to life another area of Baja California

Customer Reviews

MacKintosh's Best Baja Book
Graham MacKintosh's Into a Desert Place introduced us to this UK schoolteacher who walked the entire perimeter of Baja.
His writing style has a humility and a thoughtfulness which makes him a pleasure to read. Rather than committing the travel book era of using factual trivia to make the book more weighty, he uses allusions and background explanation as a way so that his life in the places he visits has a context and an imaginative quality. This book, Nearer My Dog to Thee, finds Mr. MacKintosh an older, but no less idealistic and whimsical,
traveller, now over 50. The "plot" of the story is quite simple.
Graham takes a pound pet from Rosarito to a remote Baja national park forest, for a Summer of camping. Mackintosh's non-fiction has a story-telling quality which makes the trip much less important than the travel.

So many travel book authors spend too much time trying to impress the reader with erudition or descriptions of the awe-inspiring or absurd. MacKintosh here merely lets a story flow, about a trip not many of us have taken, but we all wish and think we could. That may be the beauty of his writing--this is not "trip as impossible journey", but "the natural world as accessible to all".

I have a few minor quibbles with the book. Sometimes he refers to traits as "Mexican", when the traits are more properly the traits of some people he meets in Mexico. That's not to say that he's exhibiting any disturbing bias--he clearly is deeply fond of the Mexicans he meets. Rather, it's a narrative shorthand device I find imperfect.

Still, I give this book the highest recommendation. I'd read each of his other books, and thought them grand.But this more mature man exhibits a more mature writing style in this work.He still has the boyish enthusiasm, but it's now admixed with an integrated, mature perspective. I won't quite say that the "old Baja hand" is becoming old, because this one is refreshing and new. But I will say there's a richness here that really inspires.

It's hard to describe a MacKintosh book to the novice, because the combination of down-to-earth first person narrative and interesting historical detail is so deftly done. His narratives are friendly, in the way James Herriott short stories were amiable. But he casts his net quite widely--after matters of the heart and spirit, admissions of personal shortcoming, and sheer reverie at the joy of being alive.

I read Graham Mackintosh because while taking me to the middle of nowhere, he makes me nod and say "yes, I relate to that". I'll take that over any number of avalanche deaths and murderous seas in my travel reading. He's the travel writer for people who really prefer amusing, friendly novels.

A joyful armchair adventure in Baja California
Nearer My Dog To Thee: A Summer In Baja's Sky Island is a joyful armchair adventure in Baja California, through the eyes of devoted dog lover Graham Mackintosh. An exciting memoir of shooting stars, wondrous wildlife, majestic wilderness, the ferocity of a storm, kindness shown a rescued mutt, and much more, Nearer My Dog To Thee is written in a smooth, accessible style that makes following the real-life saga an extra special treat. Nearer My Dog To Thee is enthusiastically recommended reading for armchair travelers in general, and nature lovers who have their own canine companions in particular!