by Henry David Thoreau
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Product Description
INCLUDES 'WALDEN' COMPLETE; SELECTIONSFROM 'A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS' 'THE MAINE WOODS' AND THE 'JOURNAL'; EIGHTEEN POEMS AND SIXTEEN ESSAYS.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Nice Size, 2007-09-22
This is a nice size copy. I'm glad it's larger than a normal paper back.
'makes reading Thoreau a more beautiful experience.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
 Just a taste, 2006-10-25
This book is a collection of essays, poems, and chapters of books written by Thoreau. It includes:
Essays:
--Natural History of Massachusetts
--A Winter Walk
--Civil Disobedience
--Walking
--Life Without Principle
--The Last Days of John Brown
Book excerpts:
--The Wilds of Penobscot (from The Maine Woods)
--Life in the Wilderness (from The Main Woods)
--Concord to Montreal (A Yankee in Canada, Excursions)
--Selections from 1858 (Journal)
--The Wellfleet Oysterman (Cape Cod)
A sampling of 18 poems is also included, as well as the full text of Walden. Supplementing this material by Thoreau are an introduction and epilogue by the editor, a short chronology of the main events of Thoreau's life, and a short bibliography. There is no index.
For a book that tries to capture the essence and variety of Thoreau's work in one volume, the choice of essays is quite decent. "Civil Disobedience" and "The Last Days of John Brown" represent some of the best and most well known of Thoreau's political works. "Life Without Principle" is perhaps the most well-known essay describing Thoreau's economic philosophy. The remaining essays are classics of his naturalist writing. If there were more space, it would have been great to include "Autumnal Tints," "Wild Apples," or "The Succession of Forest Trees," as well. The book excerpts also present a decent selection of highlights. Certainly, Walden is Thoreau's most well-known book, and it contains material on many of his characteristic topics, so it makes sense to print the entire text. Due to space constraints, material from the other books can only be excerpted, so only the most outstanding or popular sections of the other books appear in this volume.
Carl Bode, the editor, includes a short biographical sketch of Thoreau in the introduction, and provides brief notes that describe the context for each of the items included in the book. In the biographical sketch, Bode follows the biographer Canby for the most part, and doesn't seem very impressed by Thoreau's writing on nature, terming him "merely an amateur botanizer." In the epilogue, Bode summarizes a 1957 unpublished doctoral dissertation by Raymond Gozzi, in which Gozzi does an extended Freudian psycho-analysis of Thoreau, based on his writings and known biographical details. Gozzi's findings, at least as reported by Bode, are bizarre, as for instance, when it is claimed Thoreau's affinity for swamps as being sexual in nature, or when it is proposed that Thoreau had an Oedipus complex and his relationship with John Brown was colored by his identification with Brown as a father-figure. In sum, this book provides a decent taste of many of Thoreau's more famous works. The biographical sketch can also be useful for students of Thoreau, but the epilogue is more useful as an example of the oddities of Freudian analysis than a serious account of Thoreau and his work.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 great value, 2005-10-12
Very nice collection of Thoreau's work. Perfect for anyone wanting to get better acquainted with Thoreau.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
'My life has been the poem I would have writ', 2005-01-16
This anthology contains Thoreau's major writings. First and above all 'Walden'. And then far far back the travelogue reflective work ' A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers', the famous essay on ' Civil Disobedience' which would be important for Gandhi and Martin Luther King, a scattering of his poems , 'The Maine Woods', ' A Winter Walk' ' A Yankee in Connecticut' and ' The Last Days of John Brown'
As Carl Bode makes clear in his excellent introduction surveying the work and life of Thoreau , Thoreau was always one who heard the sound of a different drummer. His aim was to be a poet , a poet who was true to the facts of life and to its deepest transcendal reflection. Bode tells the story of Thoreau seeking a way to make a living, and able to find only a vocation. And that vocation found in the two years and two months at Walden Pond gave the world a literary masterpiece and Thoreau his time of realization. Bode makes it clear that all that came before and all would come after in Thoreau's life would be anti- climax. Bode also tells the story of Thoreau's complicated relation with Emerson, and of Thoreau's learning the heart of his own doctrine from Emerson' 'Nature'. The emphasis on Nature, and on the transcendent world of the Spirit , and on a kind of life apart from the ordinary commercial business of mankind would become essential parts of Thoreau's message. And this Thoreau always closer to the facts of life than Emerson. Thoreau's two disappointed attempts at love are also seen as critical steps in re- enforcing his natural tendency to walk and dream alone. Thoreau towards the end of his life subdued a bit his radical individuality in his effort to serve the anti- slavery cause. But he is the quintessential American individualist, the man who goes his own way to see something no one else has seen before. Bode concludes his introduction with Thoreau's short poem , a summary judgment on his life' My life has been the poem I would have writ/ But I could not both live and utter it./
It is clear despite this negative judgment that in another sense the life he did come to confront and live most deeply was the one he shaped with his words. And the testament he left behind has been for many an enhancement not only of their sense of literature and poetry but of their feeling of the possibilities of life.
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
Must Read, 2004-04-20
This volume represents a collected works of Thoreau's writings, which a previous reviewer has done well to catalog. Every couple of years I find myself returning to this book to walk with Thoreau and attempt to rediscover my core values and love for pure writing and critical thinking. Thoreau invites his readers to shed the encumbrances of their lives, willingly brought upon themselves in the form of mortgages and jobs they cannot afford to abandon. In short, we become tools to our tools-that is, slaves to materialism.In "Nature," Thoreau states: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Referring, in my opinion, to the eternal quest for material items at the cost of intellectual enlightenment. According to Thoreau, a man will spend his entire life working to obtain a nicer house and to surround himself with the trappings of wealth, all the while forgetting that nature, and the pursuit of simplicity and knowledge are true wealth. This book should be a part of your home library.
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