Expect Great Things
The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
To coincide with the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth in 2017, this thrilling, meticulous biography by naturalist and historian Kevin Dann fills a gap in our understanding of one modern history's most important spiritual visionaries by capturing the full arc of Thoreau's life as a mystic, spiritual seeker, and explorer in transcendental realms.
This sweeping, epic biography of Henry David Thoreau sees Thoreau's world as the mystic himself saw it: filled with wonder and mystery; Native American myths and lore; wood sylphs, nature spirits, and fairies; battles between good and evil; and heroic struggles to live as a natural being in an increasingly synthetic world.
Above all, Expect Great Things critically and authoritatively captures Thoreau's simultaneously wild and intellectually keen sense of the mystical, mythical, and supernatural.
Other historians have skipped past or undervalued these aspects of Thoreau's life. In this groundbreaking work, historian and naturalist Kevin Dann restores Thoreau's esoteric visions and explorations to their rightful place as keystones of the man himself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dann (Lewis Creek Lost and Found) conducts a graceful, attentive inquiry into the mind of Henry David Thoreau, "mystic, transcendentalist, and natural philosopher." Dann acknowledges Thoreau's place among fellow transcendentalists Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but is more interested in the experiences that led Thoreau to his oracular poetry and the intense study of the natural world recorded in his journals. This book depicts Thoreau's scrupulous observations as both scientific and reverent, eschewing the mechanical and analytical for "a relational, sympathetic science" that saw the world as numinous and alive with spirits. It dives so deeply into the project of mapping Thoreau's internal landscape that the outline of his outer life his work, his relationships, even his famous experiment at Walden Pond of "the very serious business of living authentically" seems only lightly sketched in comparison. Dann shows an ease with the metaphysical (which is typically considered at odds with the discipline of the historian), making a warm, sympathetic argument for Thoreau as a mystic and visionary and redefining his reputation as an "indefatigable measurer of trees and truth."
