Farewell Thou Busy World

By John Bradley

"Sooner or later most men find themselves groaning under the weight of civilization; yearning to escape the ambitions, obligations, and repressions of human society. They find themselves searching for something that was lost when their ancestors abandoned the wilderness to the animals. When opportunity comes they instinctively return to their homeland of an eon ago, and in an animal's world seek the peace their own world withholds."--from Farewell Thou Busy World

Bradley, who was the publisher of Ginn & Co., wrote Farewell Thou Busy World in 1935 as a loving elegy for a natural world and an American West that he saw rapidly disappearing. Without rancor, without strident advocacy, he simply provides a wonderful window into nature that lured him from the world of business and anxiety and back into the wild.

Farewell Thou Busy World may be one of the most loving and elegantly written nature books ever produced.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1586670131
• ISBN13: 9781586670139
• Release Date: July 2000
• Publisher: Derrydale Press
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 4.7" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

A celebration of nature and the American West

John Hodgdon Bradley's "Farewell Thou Busy World" is a collection of seven essays that range from memories of a boyhood spent discovering and interacting with nature to a lament about the fast pace of visits west made by Easterners and Midwesterners who fail to get off the interstate and see the real beauty. (And this book was first published in 1935!) In total, the seven essays are less than 100 pages. But within those few pages is an engaging and polished writing style and a genuine love of nature (and of fishing). These are not the writings of someone who romanticizes nature so much as they are the thoughts of someone with an abiding appreciation of and respect for the wild. For some readers, the author's fond, perhaps roseate, recollections of his childhood might be a bit too Mayberryish, but I found the essays to be charming reads and took them leisurely, reading one every day or so, as seems to befit the pace of life described within the book's covers.