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THE ADVENTURES OF HENRY THOREAU
By: Michael Sims
Bloomsbury
February 2014
On Sale: February 18, 2014
384 pages
ISBN: 1620401959
EAN: 9781620401958
Kindle: B00GC53AFO
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Henry David Thoreau has long been an intellectual icon and folk hero. In this strikingly original profile, Michael Sims reveals how the bookish, quirky young man who kept quitting jobs evolved into the patron saint of environmentalism and nonviolent activism. Working from nineteenth-century letters and diaries by Thoreauโs family, friends, and students, Sims charts Henryโs course from his time at Harvard through the years he spent living in a cabin beside Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Sims uncovers a previously hidden Thoreauโthe rowdy boy reminiscent of Tom Sawyer, the sarcastic college iconoclast, the devoted son who kept imitating his beloved older brotherโs choices in life. Thoreau was deeply influenced by his parentsโhis father owned a pencil factory in Concord, his mother was an abolitionist and social activistโand by Ralph Waldo Emerson, his frequent mentor. Sims relates intimate, telling moments in Thoreauโs daily lifeโin Emersonโs library; teaching his neighbor and friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to row a boat; exploring the natural world and Native American culture; tutoring Emersonโs nephew on Staten Island and walking the streets of New York in the hope of launching a writing career. Returned from New York, Thoreau approached Emerson to ask if he could build a cabin on his mentorโs land on the shores of Walden Pond, anticipating the isolation would galvanize his thoughts and actions. That it did. While at the cabin, he wrote his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and refined the journal entries that formed the core of Walden. Resisting what he felt were unfair taxes, he spent the night in jail that led to his celebrated essay โCivil Disobedience,โ which would inspire the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Chronicling Thoreauโs youthful transformation, Sims reveals how this decade would resonate over the rest of his life, and thereafter throughout American literature and history.
 Media BuzzFresh Air - NPR - February 17, 2014
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