AND SLEEP IN THE WOODS: The Story of One Man's Spiritual Quest

Stirring memoirs of a trip to Canada that turned into a ten-year spiritual odyssey. In 1962 York left his home in Arkansas and headed North with his wife in a pickup truck. A restless graduate student, he was fleeing the draft and looking for something he couldn't put his finger on. After wintering in the woods of New Brunswick, he built a cabin in the wilderness near Utopia, Ontario, where he studied, meditated, and had a vision of Christ. After becoming a minister of the United Church and working from the Queen Charlotte Islands to the Northwest Territories, he returned to the States in 1972 to stand trial for draft evasion. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, but later acquitted on appeal. York is, among other things, a published novelist, and he tells his Waldenesque tale with dramatic, sensuous immediacy. The story moves easily from his mystical raptures in the snow to his comically touching adventures with a ragged congregation of down-and-outers to his harrowing return to Little Rock, when he finally comes to terms with his past. Apart from its awkward title, about the only thing wrong with this book is York's annoying habit of interrupting the narrative for asides to his wife (""Do you remember, Lynn, how. . ."") Otherwise, a vivid, wholly believable testament.