The Road to Walden
12 Life Lessons from a Sojourn to Thoreau's Cabin
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
The acclaimed author of Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau traverses on foot from Manhattan to Walden Pond, retracing Thoreau's steps and unlocking the practical principles of the mystic's life in the woods.
When Henry David Thoreau launched his experiment in living at Walden Pond, he began by walking beyond the narrow limits of his neighbors, simply by putting himself at a mile remove from Concord's bourgeois epicenter - and a thousand-mile remove from stasis, complacency, and conformity. Kevin Dann emulates and extends Thoreau's experiment in radical self-education. Alternating between personal anecdotes from his spring 2017 walking pilgrimage and other "traveler" encounters and episodes told by Thoreau, Dann structures his book around 12 "injunctions"--distillations of seminal stories about overcoming convention and stasis. In this essential reading for every Thoreau enthusiast, naturalist and historian Kevin Dann brings to life an essential American icon in refreshing and modern way.
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Naturalist and historian Dann (Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau) uses Thoreau as a pretext for these rambling reflections on his 2017 walking pilgrimage from his home in Brooklyn to Walden Pond. Along the way, he tosses off New Age flavored insights that he attempts to tie to Thoreau's writings. For example, in Walden, Thoreau praises awakening at dawn, writing, "Morning is when I am awake, and there is a dawn in me," which Dann translates into the considerably more hyperbolic injunction to "Awake! And know that you have slept with Angels." Focusing on Thoreau's acute interest in and observation of the natural world, Dann encourages readers to "sharpen perennially and perpetually" until "a sixth sense arises from your five." Adding to the sense of strain, Dann refers to Thoreau familiarly as "Henry," such as describing how he "felt close to Henry" during his journey. Dann reveals much about his own view of the world, but little about Thoreau's.
