Lassoing the sun

As a boy, Mark Woods spent summers crammed into a station wagon with his parents and two sisters, driving to national parks. His clearest memories come from Redwood, Yosemite and Grand Canyon: mountains, woods, fireflies.

On the eve of his fiftieth birthday, tired and a little burned-out, he decides to reconnect with the outdoors. His plan is to spend a year visiting the national parks.

The plan has two parts. He wants to take his mother to a park she has never seen. He also means to re-create those childhood trips with his wife and their daughter, who has grown up with an iPad in her hand.

Then his mother is diagnosed with cancer and given only months to live. Woods had meant to write about the future of the national parks. The book he ends up with is a memoir that follows a family on the road. It asks what we inherit from our parents and what we pass on.