The Portable Thoreau (Portable Library)

by Henry David Thoreau

Book Overview

An updated edition of Thoreau's most widely read worksSelf-described as "a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot," Henry David Thoreau dedicated his life to preserving his... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140150315
• Release Date: January 1964
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 698 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 1.3" x 5.1"

Customer Reviews

Nice Size

This is a nice size copy. I'm glad it's larger than a normal paper back. 'makes reading Thoreau a more beautiful experience.

'My life has been the poem I would have writ'

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.

Must Read

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.

'We must look a long time before we can see'

I'll be honest: I picked this up because I wanted a copy of _Walden_, and getting a selection of Thoreau's other writings was icing on the cake, so if all you want is to confirm that this contains the uncut text of _Walden_, I assure you that it does. For completeness, though, I'll mention everything else in the book as well, with a few quotes to let Thoreau speak for himself."Natural History of Massachusetts", 1842 - This isn't what the title might suggest, still less the official subject (given the usual dryness of scientific papers). Like G K Chesterton's Father Brown, Thoreau takes the view that science is a grand thing when you can get it, but that the true scientist should be able to know nature better, and to have more experience of it by noticing fine detail without losing the big picture. "I would keep some book of natural history always by me as a sort of elixir, the reading of which should restore the tone of the system.""A Winter Walk", 1843 - Exactly that, seen through Thoreau's eyes. "There is a slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out, and which no cold can chill.""The Maine Woods", 1848 - A year after retiring to Walden Pond, Thoreau took a trip to Maine, recorded herein. Some of the word-pictures drawn include those of the pines before logging - and afterward, when rendered down to matches. But once away from the areas near Bangor, much of the country was still wilderness. "And the whole of that solid and interminable forest is doomed to be gradually devoured thus by fire, like shavings, and no man be warmed by it.""Civil Disobedience", 1849 - Very influential on Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and quite capable of making a reader squirm even today - if one isn't prepared to back up one's principles with action."A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", 1849 - Not just a travelogue; this is Thoreau, after all, so extra layers of historical discussion and a little poetry are here too. This is a revised and somewhat trimmed version from the original - Thoreau's own later text."A Yankee in Canada", 1853 - The beginning of Thoreau's tale of his first journey to Quebec, with a bit of culture shock at his first exposure to a Roman Catholic society."Walden", 1854 This would be worth reading if only for 'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately...', re-popularized in these latter days because of its prominence in the film _Dead Poets' Society_, I expect."Journal", 1858 - Not Thoreau's entire journal for 1858, but a selection. The complete journal was his collecting-point of raw material - everything from first drafts of letters, essays, and lectures, to a review of every natural detail the trained surveyor had seen that day."The Last Days of John Brown", 1860 - Thoreau didn't attend John Brown's memorial service, but wrote this essay, which was read for him. "Now he has not laid aside the sword of the spirit, for he is pure spirit himself, and his sword is pure spirit also.""Walking", 1862 - "I have

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately...

This is a "collected works"-type volume, which I recommend because it gives you the whole package deal, and if you enjoy *Walden* you'll probably want to read more. *Walden*, Thoreau's most famous work, is my favorite book in all the world. Though it is admittedly not for everyone, there is a virtuosity and vibrance to his prose which led one critic to call it some of the best poetry in the English language. In 1845 Henry Thoreau built a small house with his own two hands on the shore of Walden Pond, just outside Concord, Massachusetts, and proceeded to inhabit it for two years, two months, and two days with the purpose of discovering the meaning of life, of paring life down to its most basic elements through self-exploration and communion with nature. Seeing nature through Thoreau's eyes is an experience akin to that of a farsighted person donning corrective lenses for the first time and discovering the extraordinary beauty of things which had been right in front of him all his life. This should be required reading for anyone with any environmental feeling and for anyone interested in self-reliance and personal freedom (which should be all of you). You might want to read "Civil Disobedience" too: people of the ilk of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. lived by this essay on passive resistance. The introduction and epilog by Thoreau scholar Carl Bode frame the volume well and offer enlightening and apt insights into Thoreau's history and psyche