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    Henry David Thoreau: A Life
    Henry David Thoreau: A Life
    Henry David Thoreau: A Life
    Audiobook22 hours

    Henry David Thoreau: A Life

    Written by Laura Dassow Walls

    Narrated by Paul Boehmer

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    “Walden. Yesterday I came here to live.” That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to “live deliberately” in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854.

    But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau's character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, “Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided.” Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls restores Henry David Thoreau to us in all his profound, inspiring complexity.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateNov 7, 2017
    ISBN9781541485075

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    Reviews for Henry David Thoreau

    4.5/5

    38 ratings6 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Beautifully written and as thorough as any biography on Thoreau. Having been to Walden Pond and walked on the ground where he build his cabin, reading the parts of Thoreau’s life from WP were all that more meaningful. This biography dispels the myth that Henry was a solitary man. He was anything but a loner. In fact, when he went on excursions, it was his preference to take someone along, and he usually did. Reading Walden is enough to given readers an appreciation of Thoreau’s powers of observation and documentation. He filled hundreds of notebooks during his lifetime, a treasure trove of information about nature and the wonders of nature. Laura Dassow Walls has given Thoreau fans a gift to complement the great author’s masterpiece, Walden.
    • 5/5
      Brings to life the man, Thoreau and how biographical all his works were.
    • 5/5
      Detailed, rich, and very moving. I actually shed some tears at the end: one gets to know Thoreau (or, I guess, to be accurate, Walls's version of him) so well, that his quiet death really leaves a mark in one's consciousness when it occurs. This beautiful biography is everything I could have wanted, and is sending me back to the works with a vengeance.
    • 5/5
      Beautifully written and as thorough as any biography on Thoreau. Having been to Walden Pond and walked on the ground where he build his cabin, reading the parts of Thoreau’s life from WP were all that more meaningful. This biography dispels the myth that Henry was a solitary man. He was anything but a loner. In fact, when he went on excursions, it was his preference to take someone along, and he usually did. Reading Walden is enough to given readers an appreciation of Thoreau’s powers of observation and documentation. He filled hundreds of notebooks during his lifetime, a treasure trove of information about nature and the wonders of nature. Laura Dassow Walls has given Thoreau fans a gift to complement the great author’s masterpiece, Walden.
    • 5/5
      About the time I read a review of this book, my wife and I visited Concord, MA, and spent several hours at Walden Pond. Both of us had read and been profoundly impacted by Thoreau's "Walden" and I also by his essay on civil disobedience. I realized I wanted to read more about him, and Dassow's biography was the perfect book for me. I learned of Thoreau's intricate web of relationships and avid Abolitionism, his early acceptance of Darwin's thinking on evolution and his own late life research into evolution and what we now call ecology. Not to mention his understanding, just as the Indian Wars gained speed, that Native Americans deserved respect and dignified treatment, and that they could teach us much about how to live in our environment.
    • 4/5
      a very readable bio of thoreau. some interesting aspects of his life, one for most of his life he lived with his parents, his mother was a activity abolitionist, as was henry! in fact thoreau was one of the first public figures to speak out for john brown. thoreau made almost no money from his writing. his sexuality is not well known. he is only asked one woman to marry, she said no. in his writings he saw sex as a very natural thing. however there nothing in writings and he wrote in his journal almost every day about being in love in a erotic way. he saw sex as a spiritual act. a personal of great engery