Author Biography

Robert Moor is the New York Times bestselling author of On Trails and the creator of the podcast Joe Exotic: Tiger King. His writing has appeared in New York magazine, The New York Times, GQ, Harper's, and n+1, among other publications. He is currently at work on a new book, entitled In Trees.

Review

- Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award
- Finalist for the BC National Non-Fiction Award
- Longlist for the Goodreads Choice Award for Best Science and Technology
- Seattle Times' Best Books of 2016
- Boston Globe's Best Books of 2016
- Amazon's Best Nonfiction Books of 2016
- The Telegraph's Best Travel Books of 2016
- National Post's Best Books of 2016
- New York Magazine's 5 Best Science Books of 2016
- Waterstones' Best Travel Writing of 2016
- The Guardian Bookshop's Best Nature Writing of 2016
- Booklist's Top 10 Literary Travel Books of 2016
"[A] fascinating debut ... both fun and intriguing. ... Following Moor's trails in this book opens many fascinating vistas."
--The Seattle Times
"[Moor] brilliantly synthesizes his own hiking experiences so that distinctions between history, science, and philosophy meld into a beautiful book."
--The National Book Review
"A beautiful thing to behold. ... what a profoundly talented writer Moor is. He brings a keen essayist's eye to themes both personal and empiric; his prose is lush and lively and his analysis adroit -- all making On Trails a true treat to read."
--BuzzFeed Books
"A hike becomes a classic when it takes hold of a person like a memorable story - when the journey is marked by surprises. On Trails, the first book by American journalist Robert Moor, embodies this. It is a surprising story of trails as Moor takes us on disparate journeys. ... As Moor walks, his bigger themes coalesce - and evolve. [His] exploration becomes a consideration of the trail/path of life, where to walk, how to live."
--The Globe and Mail
"A sagacious walker and writer guides us on a new journey of discovery, a different kind of road trip about roads themselves and what they mean. [On Trails] is consistently fascinating and entertaining. ... With side trips to areas scarcely visited before, this is a fine guide to places with better views of the world."
--Kirkus Reviews
"A wanderer's dream, even from an armchair."
--The Economist
"A wonderfully rich and human book. It is a trail all on its own, marked by the procession of internal contemplation and idea-spinning that a long solitary walk in the woods can produce. Moor is interested in everything, with a knack for communicating that curiosity to the reader ... Fascinating facts fall fast and furiously ... He has succeeded admirably. Thru-hikers be warned: you'll be ditching some essentials to make room for On Trails in your pack."
--Portland Press Herald
"An ingeniously conceived collection. ... Like Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic, Moor's book is an appealing mix of the physical and philosophical."
--National Post, "The books you should be reading in July"
"An inspired exploration of the collective wisdom of trails. The warm, sinuous line of the narrative is its own reward."
--William Finnegan, author of Barbarian Days
"Chockful of historical trivia, philosophical musings, and an unflagging sense of joy in winding one's way through both the outdoors and the inner self, Moor's multi-dimensional exploration earns him a place on the map of writers to watch. ... Moor [is] an elegant essayist and fastidious researcher. ... Whether perambulating or cogitating, if you love to follow a twisting path, making unexpected connections between Point A and Point B, you'll love the literary adventure of nonfiction writer Robert Moor's compelling debut."
--Passport Magazine
"Falling into a trail trance, for Moor, opened the spigot to a torrent of questions--most of them scientific, some of them philosophical, and nearly all of them profound, provocative, and under Moor's analysis, deeply entertaining. ... Little flowers of information bloom on the graceful canes of Moor's prose. He's erudite, witty, and relentlessly curious."
--Garden & Gun
"For a combination of adventure physical and intellectual, this book is tough to beat. ... It's the perfect companion for a long hike someplace down the trail."
--Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature and Wandering Home
"Hanging with [Moor] you meet a host of different byways, get in (and out) of trouble and the experience is not just enlightening, it's sweaty, hot, cold and...well, to say it plainly...fun."
--Robert Krulwich, "Curiously Krulwich," National Geographic
"Here is an erudite meditation on the communities of creatures who roam the planet, and how they decide where to go. Robert Moor's eye scans from the dirt beneath his boot to the wide expanse of animal movement through time and through space. He is a pilgrim and a philosopher, walking and wondering, talking to thinkers and thinking wisely on his own; and his book is a lively companion, whether for your own long walks or for contemplating the lines we make across fields and through snow."
--Ted Conover, author of The Routes of Man and Rolling Nowhere
"Hiker and journalist Moor [is] the rare thru-hiker whose philosophical ramblings you'll actually want to read. ... [A] treatise on how trails--the ones we plan and the ones we accidentally leave behind--shape our culture."
--Outside
"In the hallowed tradition of Robert Macfarlane, Moor's beautiful travelogue is a meditation on trails: as cultural space, as history, as intimate terrain. This is just the ticket for your big summer adventure."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"Like Montaigne, Mr. Moor writes about one subject as a way of touching on 100 others. Although his ostensible topic is how humans and other creatures make the routes that get them from A to B, On Trails also considers Greek mythology and the origins of life, the intricacy of caterpillar nests and the stealth of elephants, the physicist Richard Feynman and the Biblical Cain. The thicket of information here comes to resemble a densely wooded trail itself--one that Mr. Moor expertly navigates. He's a philosopher on foot, recording his journey through miles of wilderness and through a mind sorting out the meaning of travel itself. ... The only constant in On Trails is the promise of surprise."
--The Wall Street Journal
"Moor's writing compares better with wilderness philosophers like Annie Dillard or Edward Abbey. Each chapter of this GQ writer's debut work is packed with ideas, switchbacking to and fro. Each idea is so carefully portrayed and deeply fascinating that I had to stop and catch my breath often. ... It's a beautiful trek through the human and natural landscapes of modern life."
--Chicago Review of Books
"My old professor used to say, no matter how good a book is there is always a 'however.' However, I don't have a however with On Trails. This book is a gift to those of us who like to let our minds and feet wander. As a guide Robert Moor is deeply knowledgeable, entertaining, easy-going, erudite, and funny, leading us on a trip that winds around the world and culminates in a profound discussion of the meaning of human wisdom. He shows us that connectivity didn't start with a keyboard, but on the pathways that we created as those same pathways were creating us. With this inspiring book as your map, you can indulge in those twin passions that made us human: thinking and walking."
--David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains
"Part natural history, part scientific inquiry, but most of all a deeply thoughtful human meditation on how we walk through life, Moor's book is enchanting."
--The Boston Globe
"Profound and interesting, it dwells on big questions and brings together an engaging collection of facts and stories."
--Book Riot, One of the best Science/Nature books published this summer
"Robert Moor gets you thinking. What is the meaning of trails in human history, ecology, the journeys of life? Gary Snyder and dharma, E.O. Wilson and ants, the International Appalachian Trail? It's a sinuous route to a robust relationship between feet and landscape. Walk on."
--David Quammen, author of Spillover and The Song of the Dodo
"Robert Moor's primer on the history of trails is a literary gem, encompassing everything from insect travel to road-building in Colonial America. Addictive readers and knowledge junkies, however, should be careful. On Trails is a whirlpool of fact that will suck you in and not let go."
--Rinker Buck, author of The Oregon Trail
"Spectacular ... an example of narrative nonfiction at its finest. Those with a passion for walking, hiking or exploring will be naturally drawn to Moor's subject, but this is so much more than a subject-specific story; it is a book that poses big questions about humanity's place in the world (literally and figuratively) and how we've come to be here--and it's fascinating to its very end."
--Shelf Awareness
"Stunning ... a wondrous nonfiction debut. ... In each chapter, Moor explores the same phenomenon in a surprising new context, from the fossilized traces of prehistoric smudges to swaths of jungle flattened by elephants, from the paths of nomadic Native Americans to the interstates that paved them over. Along the way, Moor reaches into the history of science, religion, and philosophy to trace similar lines of refinement in the amassing of knowledge and ideas. ... It's an exhilarating journey."
--Departures
"The best outdoors book of the year. ... An outstanding work that should be read by anyone who has spent time following a footpath through the woods. Robert Moor's debut book, On Trails, trips through natural history, anthropology, gonzo reporter's adventures, and memoir in a ramble that unpacks the many meanings of the routes we humans and other animals sketch on the land. ... The prologue alone is worth the price of admission: a nearly-30-page set piece about hiking the A.T. that puts Bill Bryson and Cheryl Strayed to shame. (Moor actually, you know, completed the full thru-hike.)"
--Sierra Club
"There are revelations at every turn here, from the nature of shepherding, to the vast network of ancient animal and Native American trails that underlie modern North America, to the very qualities of the best trails--durability, efficiency, and flexibility--and how we learn from them even as we move beyond them....[A] deeply informed study of nature and history of trailmaking."
--Booklist, Starred Review
"This book is about so many things: about breaking down the binary between 'humanity' and 'nature, ' 'civilization' and 'the wild.' It's an exploration of exploring, a philosophical-psychological-journalistic adventure in the tradition of Michael Pollan and Rebecca Solnit. ... Not all who wander are lost, and Moor helps us see what they seek."
--New York Magazine
"This strange and delightful book combines the best elements of travelogue, science writing, and spiritual guidebook. The work of a curious, hungry, eccentric, and profoundly secular mind, it leaps from ants to elephants to the Internet to us in beautiful, looping prose. You can find something brilliant and enlightening on every page. While Moor hikes his trail through our world, teaching you amazing things you never imagined learning, he also manages to be not just entertaining but actually funny. In the end though, his goal is to show us that our own species, and the other species with whom we share the planet, have a trail-hardened wisdom that, respected properly, might just save us all from catastrophe."
--Amy Wilentz, author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo
"You might think of Robert Moor as the Roger Angell of trail-walking. Just as Angell's reports on specific baseball games segue effortlessly into reflections on the venerable sport itself, so Moor looks up from whatever trail he may be on to see the big picture. Which is often very big, indeed. ... Highly satisfying ... On Trails is an engaging blend of travelogue, sociology, history and philosophy that might be summed up as a meditation on the centrality of trails to animal and human life."
--The Washington Post

Review Quote

"You might think of Robert Moor as the Roger Angell of trail-walking. Just as Angell's reports on specific baseball games segue effortlessly into reflections on the venerable sport itself, so Moor looks up from whatever trail he may be on to see the big picture. Which is often very big, indeed.

Excerpt from Book

On Trails PROLOGUE ONCE, YEARS AGO, I left home looking for a grand adventure and spent five months staring at mud. It was the spring of 2009, and I had set out to walk the full length of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. My departure date was timed so that I would transition seamlessly from a mild southern spring to a balmy northern summer, but for some reason the warmth never arrived. It stayed cool that year, rained often. Newspapers likened it to the freak summer of 1816, when cornfields froze to their roots, pink snow fell over Italy, and a young Mary Shelley, locked up in a gloomy villa in Switzerland, began to dream of monsters. My memories of the hike consist chiefly of wet stone and black earth. The vistas from many of the mountaintops were blotted out. Shrouded in mist, rain hood up, eyes downcast, mile after mile, month after month, I had little else to do but study the trail beneath my nose with Talmudic intensity. In his novel The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac refers to this kind of walking as "the meditation of the trail." Japhy Ryder, a character modeled after the Zen poet Gary Snyder, advises his friend to "walk along looking at the trail at your feet and don''t look about and just fall into a trance as the ground zips by." Trails are seldom looked at this intently. When hikers want to complain about a particularly rough stretch of trail, we gripe that we spent the whole day looking down at our feet. We prefer to look up, away, off into the distance. Ideally, a trail should function like a discreet aide, gracefully ushering us through the world while still preserving our sense of agency and independence. Perhaps this is why, for virtually all of literary history, trails have remained in the periphery of our gaze, down at the bottommost edge of the frame: they have been, quite literally, beneath our concern. As hundreds--and then thousands--of miles of trail passed beneath my eyes, I began to ponder the meaning of this endless scrawl. Who created it? Why does it exist? Why, moreover, does any trail? Even after I reached the end of the AT, these questions followed me around. Spurred on by them, and sensing in some vague way that they might lead to new intellectual ground, I began to search for the deeper meaning of trails. I spent years looking for answers, which led me to yet bigger questions: Why did animal life begin to move in the first place? How does any creature start to make sense of the world? Why do some individuals lead and others follow? How did we humans come to mold our planet into its current shape? Piece by piece, I began to cobble together a panoramic view of how pathways act as an essential guiding force on this planet: on every scale of life, from microscopic cells to herds of elephants, creatures can be found relying on trails to reduce an overwhelming array of options to a single expeditious route. Without trails, we would be lost. My quest to find the nature of trails often proved trickier than I had expected. Modern hiking trails loudly announce their presence with brightly painted signs and blazes, but older trails are more inconspicuous. The footpaths of some ancient indigenous societies, like the Cherokee, were no more than a few inches wide. When Europeans invaded North America, they slowly widened parts of the native trail network, first to accommodate horses, then wagons, then automobiles. Now, much of that network is buried beneath modern roadways, though remnants of the old trail system can still be found when you know where--and how--to look. Other trails are yet more obscure. The trails of some woodland mammals dimple the underbrush so faintly that only an experienced tracker can point them out. Ants nose along chemical pathways that are wholly invisible. (One trick to seeing them, I learned, is to sprinkle the area with lycopodium, the same powder police use to dust for fingerprints.) A few trails are tucked away underground: termites and naked mole-rats carve tunnels through the earth, marking them with traces of pheromones to keep their bearings. Finer still are the tangled neural pathways within a single human brain, which are so multitudinous that even the world''s most advanced computers cannot yet map them all. Technology, meanwhile, is busy knitting itself into an intricate network of pathways, dug deep underfoot and strung ethereally overhead, so that information can race across continents. I learned that the soul of a trail--its trail-ness--is not bound up in dirt and rocks; it is immaterial, evanescent, as fluid as air. The essence lies in its function: how it continuously evolves to serve the needs of its users. We tend to glorify trailblazers--those hardy souls who strike out across uncharted territory, both figurative and physical--but followers play an equally important role in creating a trail. They shave off unnecessary bends and brush away obstructions, improving the trail with each trip. It is thanks to the actions of these walkers that the trail becomes, in the words of Wendell Berry, "the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place." In bewildering times--when all the old ways seem to be dissolving into mire--it serves us well to turn our eyes earthward and study the oft-overlooked wisdom beneath our feet. + I was ten years old when I first glimpsed that a trail could be something more than a strip of bare dirt. That summer, my parents shipped me off to a small, antiquated summer camp in Maine called Pine Island, where there was no electricity or running water, only kerosene lanterns and cold lake. During the second of my six weeks there, a handful of us boys were loaded into a van and driven many hours away to the base of Mount Washington, for what was to be my first backpacking trip. As a child of the concretized prairies of suburban Illinois, I was apprehensive. The act of lugging a heavy pack through the mountains looked suspiciously like one of those penitent rituals that adults sometimes forced themselves to perform, like visiting distant relatives or eating crusts of bread. I was wrong, though; it was worse. Our counselors had allotted us three days to climb the eight miles to the top of Mount Washington and back down, which should have been ample time. But the trail was steep, and I was scrawny. My backpack--a heavy, ill-fitting, aluminum-

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