The Backyard Adventurer is a collection of lived experiences of the YouTuber Beau Miles. It connects Miles’s lifestyle pillars of adventuring, fitness, making, and Australia in a practical, unpolished way that stays true to his character. YouTube subscribers will recognize the stories in The Backyard Adventurer, but experience new perspectives and context that enhance the familiar events that define Miles’s adventurer resume.
Miles’s YouTube channel offers an array of adventuring, building, and Q&A videos with beautiful cinematography, crisp audio, and enticing thumbnails. The building and adventuring videos cover a lot of the philosophy you will be exposed to through The Backyard Adventurer, that of rediscovering Australia, slowing down, and the power of the human body. Where the book offers the most new information is around Miles’s life prior to all of the videos.
Readers learn about the story behind the man in The Backyard Adventurer. Spending many summers working at a camp in Vermont, pursuing a PhD in Outdoor Education, and employing some efficent, yet unorthodox dating strategies show us the formations of the philosophies that shape Beau Miles. It feels as Miles has lived several lives with the amount of stories he pulls from during reflections, making clear that he has never truly slowed down.
With his emphasis on efficiency through all his life - made evident in his stories - Miles makes no exception for The Backyard Adventurer. Coming in at under 300 pages, Miles packs in dozens of stories without offering an overarching narrative. Readers are left piecing together their own narrative with the recurring themes, but ultimately the book is a collection of stories.
I discovered Miles through his YouTube channel and thoroughly enjoy both his videos and The Backyard Adventurer, however I was hoping for a bit more of a narrative. I give The Backyard Adventurer a 4/5 stars.