Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau
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2.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A New Yorker Best Book of 2022
A New England Indie Bestselller
A New York Times Best Book of Summer, a Wall Street Journal and Town & Country Best Book of Spring
“A gorgeous reminder that walking is the most radical form of locomotion nowadays.” —Nick Offerman
“I think Thoreau would have liked this book, and that’s a high recommendation.” —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature
On an autumn morning in 1849, Henry David Thoreau stepped out his front door to walk the beaches of Cape Cod. Over a century and a half later, Ben Shattuck does the same. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau’s path through the Cape’s outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertip.
This is the first of six journeys taken by Shattuck, each one inspired by a walk once taken by Henry David Thoreau. After the Cape, Shattuck goes up Mount Katahdin and Mount Wachusett, down the coastline of his hometown, and then through the Allagash. Along the way, Shattuck encounters unexpected characters, landscapes, and stories, seeing for himself the restorative effects that walking can have on a dampened spirit. Over years of following Thoreau, Shattuck finds himself uncovering new insights about family, love, friendship, and fatherhood, and understanding more deeply the lessons walking can offer through life’s changing seasons.
Intimate, entertaining, and beautifully crafted, Six Walks is a resounding tribute to the ways walking in nature can inspire us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this resplendent debut, Pushcart Prize winner Shattuck traipses from quiet elegy to compassionate celebration through a series of jaunts patterned after Henry David Thoreau's rambles. Hoping to escape "a constellation of grief" over a breakup, Shattuck set out one May to walk the beaches of Cape Cod, retracing the footsteps of Thoreau. What started as a distraction turned into six separate treks, vividly brought to life here in Shattuck's poetic retelling. On his first outing, a serendipitous meeting delivers him to the oysterman's cottage where Thoreau slept 150 years earlier. When Shattuck's later diagnosed with Lyme disease, he's spurred to tackle two hikes: up Maine's Katahdin and Massachusetts's Wachusett mountains—where Thoreau walked after his brother's death and, like Shattuck, found "consolation" in the stars, "displac bulging selfhood, under the shadow of such urgent beauty as the night sky." After getting engaged, Shattuck returned to his roamings with a lighter heart, traveling to his family's ancestral home in Sakonnet Harbor; the northernmost point of Thoreau's Maine walk; and Cape Cod again, where he reconciled his grief as a necessary "period of fragility that brings your emotions closest to the surface." Echoing Thoreau's brilliant reflections with his own, Shattuck distills the healing power of nature into a narrative that's a pure pleasure to wander through. Fans of Annie Dillard will find this mesmerizing.
