Outsider: My Boyhood with Thoreau

Outsider: My Boyhood with Thoreau is a memoir told in vignettes by the mycologist and author Lawrence Millman. Early on, Millman found in Thoreau a kindred spirit, far outside of the mainstream social, sporting, and educational interests he was expected to be cultivating. And like Thoreau, he would rather be out-of-doors — where he could socialize with mushrooms, insects, or earthworms — than stuck in any indoor locale.

Praise for Outsider

"Henry David, I think, would have wanted you to carry this in your hip pocket, to be mulled over in small bites while walking."
     — Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and editor of American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau

"This book is small in size, but huge in spirit. Read it, revel in it, then make your way outside and get some dirt on your clothes."
     — Gregory McNamee, author of Gila: The Life and Death of an American River

"What could be better than a pairing of Lawrence Millman and Henry David Thoreau? Outsider is a piece to cherish and a reminder that we are never alone as long as words live on the printed page."

     — David Breithaupt, contributor LA Review of Books

"If you read Larry Millman (and the gods help you if you don't!), then you already know he is an odd fellow. This sweet and sharp beauty of a bagatelle lets us in on how he got that way, with a good many grins and groans along the way. And it leaves us feeling lucky that Larry, like Henry, has followed his own nose, and no one else's. Long may he veer!"
     — Robert Michael Pyle, author of Children of the Night and The Thunder Tree

"In a culture gone insane, misfits are our best or perhaps only hope. Two meet in Millman's kaleidoscopic mini-memoir of boyhood days. The mind on display—like Thoreau's—thrills to the tune of nature, drawn by the generally neglected or even despised: slugs, mushrooms, millipedes, earthworms…. Clear-eyed, wild as youth itself, with its hands in the dirt and teeming with life, Outsider earns a place on the shelf next to that transcendentalist's essay 'Walking.'"
     — Michael Engelhard, author of Arctic Traverse

"Outsider is as refreshing as sitting by Walden Pond on a drizzly silver afternoon."

     — Eric Paul Shaffer, author of Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems

"Millman has unique way of observing nature to better understand the world."

     — Richard B. Primack, author of Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau's Woods

"Lawrence Millman is that rarest of creatures — a nature writer with a sense of humor. He would have kept his buddy Henry David Thoreau in stitches."

     — Jim Christy, author of The Rough Road to the North and Traveling Light

"Lawrence Millman's idle reflections on a childhood spent with Henry David Thoreau are at once irreverent, enlightening, and entertaining. Thoreau must be clawing at the lid of his coffin to join in on the fun."
     — David O. Born, author of Hypothermia