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Grady Harp is an Amazon Top 10 Reviewer
Jeff Alt has a mission: reacquaint the world with the beauties and the challenges of Nature and find inner peace and the source of human kindness. And if that sounds like a hopelessly impossible task for these times in which we live, then his A Walk For Sunshine: a 2,160 mile expedition for charity on the Appalachian Trail, 2nd just may change that.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to read this entertaining and meaningful book and not rearrange mindsets as to priorities and the significance of living in the moment.
Jeff Alt may not be an academically trained writer, or a student of philosophy, or a prophet sent among us to alert our attention to environmental issues and the importance of family, but in Alt’s case, those ‘restrictions’ allow him to relate in more simple honest terms a life altering experience and stimulate each of us to find our own dream journey - and follow it!
The story is well summarized in all the reviews of this revised version of A WALK FOR SUNSHINE (and Epilogue has been added to make the events of the book more accessible to the novice hiker/reader).
In 1998 Alt make the trek from Georgia to Maine, the Appalachian Trail of 2160 miles, on foot, surviving in the ‘wilderness’ to prove that he 1) could accomplish his dream of thru-hiking the treacherous trail and 2) to raise money for the Sunshine Home for the Disabled, a home that cares for his brother Aaron, a young lad with Cerebral Palsy.
Like any fine journal the author writes of the agonies, the physical challenges, the struggles with sustenance among the wildlife and the extremes of Nature’s seasonal changes while at the same time offering anecdotes both hilarious and heartwarming, moments when he bonded with trail partners and moments when Nature seemed determined to squelch his drive to complete his journey.
But complete it he did and now ten years later he gives us all of those moments day by day during his four-month long trek. His writing style is conversational: this is not the sophisticated poetic collection of entries of a Thoreau but rather the humanistic need to communicate the splendor of nature. As one would expect, along the way he does communicate with the Higher Being but in a way that is never preachy but rather wholly credible, given the near death challenges he faced. And in the end this journey, upon completion, gained much needed fundraising for Sunshine Home as well as fostering a changed man who sees the universe more clearly and shares his drive to protect our little globe.
A WALK FOR SUNSHINE makes a great bedside inspiration book, a thoughtful gift for friends and family who are struggling with apparent insurmountable odds, and an excellent reference for ‘youths’ of all ages.
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