Amazon.com: The Maine Woods (Penguin Nature Library) (9780140170139): Henry David Thoreau, Edward Hoagland: Books
The Maine Woods and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Learn more


or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering.
or
Amazon Prime Free Trial required. Sign up when you check out. Learn More
Kindle Edition
 
   
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
The Maine Woods (Penguin Nature Library)
 
 
Start reading The Maine Woods on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

The Maine Woods (Penguin Nature Library) [Paperback]

Henry David Thoreau (Author), Edward Hoagland (Introduction)
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)

List Price: $17.00
Price: $11.56 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $5.44 (32%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Only 2 left in stock--order soon (more on the way).
Want it delivered Monday, February 27? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details

Formats

Amazon Price New from Used from
Kindle Edition --  
Paperback $11.56  

Book Description

September 1, 1988
"What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone!...Here was traveling of the old heroic kind over the unaltered face of nature." Henry David Thoreau

Over a period of three years, Thoreau made three trips to the largely unexplored woods of Maine. He climbed mountains, paddled a canoe by moonlight, and dined on cedar beer, hemlock tea and moose lips. Taking notes constantly, Thoreau was just as likely to turn his observant eye to the habits and languages of the Abnaki Indians or the arduous life of the logger as he was to the workings of nature. He acutely observed the rivers, lakes, mountains, wolves, moose, and stars in the dark sky. He also told of nights sitting by the campfire, and of meeting men who communicated with each other by writing on the trunks of trees. In The Maine Woods, Thoreau captured a wilder side of America and revealed his own adventurous spirit.


Frequently Bought Together

Customers buy this book with The Wilderness World of John Muir $10.63

The Maine Woods (Penguin Nature Library) + The Wilderness World of John Muir
  • This item: The Maine Woods (Penguin Nature Library)

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

  • The Wilderness World of John Muir

    In Stock.
    Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
    Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details


Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought


Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. He graduated from Harvard in 1837, the same year he began his lifelong Journal. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau became a key member of the Transcendentalist movement that included Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott. The Transcendentalists' faith in nature was tested by Thoreau between 1845 and 1847 when he lived for twenty-six months in a homemade hut at Walden Pond. While living at Walden, Thoreau worked on the two books published during his lifetime: Walden (1854) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Several of his other works, including The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and Excursions, were published posthumously. Thoreau died in Concord, at the age of forty-four, in 1862.
Edward Hoagland's books include The Courage of Turtles, Walking the Dead Diamond River, Red Wolves and Black Bears, and Notes from the Century Before: A Journal from British Columbia.

Product Details

  • Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  • Paperback: 464 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (September 1, 1988)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0140170138
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140170139
  • Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #116,448 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

 

Customer Reviews

10 Reviews
5 star:
 (6)
4 star:
 (3)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:    (0)
1 star:    (0)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
4.5 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Thoreau's Three Ambitious Adventures in Maine, March 23, 2008
By 
This review is from: The Maine Woods (Penguin Nature Library) (Paperback)
"The Maine Woods" relates three separate trips Henry Thoreau made to the Mount Katahdin and Allagash Wilderness Waterway region of Maine At 29 years old in 1846, at 36 years old in 1853, and at 40 years old in 1857. In each of the stories he travels with a friend by rail, steamboat, and coach to the starting point, hires a guide, and embarks on his adventure. Even for a reader familiar with the region, it is essential to keep a map handy to follow the author in his travels. In the first trip he hires a local outfitter as a guide, and poles up the West Branch of the Penobscot River, across lakes and up streams, as close to Mt. Katahdin as he can get, then climbs to the summit of what the Indians called Ktaadn, or "highest land," and now called Mt. Katahdin. His route up the mountain approximated what we now know as the Abol trail, though with no trail to follow, his experience was very different from today's Abol daypacker. He summited on a cloudy day, and missed out on the breathtaking views, though he did get infected with the spiritual bug, and he waxes philosophical as he makes his way back down. Thoreau's enduring memory of the region is "the continuousness of the forest." Thanks to the generous 209,501 acre gift of one of Maine's Governors, Percival Baxter, that memory of Thoreau's is also likely to be yours.

By contrast, the second story is less adventurous, being a canoe-camping trip on Chesuncook and surrounding lakes. Thoreau ends the story reflecting on man's vulnerability in the wilderness, and prays that man will not become "civilized off the face of the earth." I take this trip to be fundamentally a reconnaissance for the third and most ambitious of his trips, titled "The Allagash and East Branch." He went to Maine this time intending to make the standard Allagash Wilderness Waterway trip that many of us plan and few ever make. He lets himself get talked out of it and into a considerably more difficult trip. He starts as with the Chesuncook trip, but carries on northward into Chamberlain, Eagle, Telos, and Webster Lakes, and through Webster Stream to Second Lake and Great Lake Matagamon. From there it's flat water down the East Branch of the Penobscot. The Webster Stream segment was basically a ten mile portage. Fortunately he had hired a most remarkable Indian Guide, Joe Polis. Polis took his homemade birch bark canoe down through the Webster Stream rapids alone, and Thoreau and his companion (whom he unaccountably never names), fought their way through the thick underbrush and the jumble of trees along the riverbank. In summary, he takes the West Branch upstream as far as it goes, traverses the high elevation lakes over to the headwaters of the East Branch, and completely circles the Katahdin massif in the process.

Thoreau does not consistently delight the reader with is craft; his creative spirit is intermittent. But when inspired, he rises to the task:

Referring to the logs which get hung up along the shore, waiting for a freshet to carry them down to the sawmill, he writes, "Methinks that must be where all my property lies, cast up on the rocks along some distant and unexplored stream, and waiting for an unheard of freshet to fetch it down."

And about the noises he hears at night, "When camping in such a wilderness as this, you are prepared to hear sounds from some of its inhabitants which give voice to its wildness."

And his boatmen: "...so cool, so collected, so fertile in resources are they."

And anyone who has trod through the dark, damp woods between those lakes will recognize this: "It was impossible for us to discern the Indian's trail in the elastic moss, which like a thick carpet, covered every rock and fallen tree, as well as the earth.

And while experiencing one of the Allagash's classic thunderstorms: "I thought it must be a place where the thunder loved, where the lightning practiced to keep its hand in, and it would do no harm to shatter a few pines.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars North Country Meander, December 21, 2007
By 
paul arbor (Jersey City, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Maine Woods (Penguin Nature Library) (Paperback)
What a shame most people will never get beyond Walden...

This title is a joy and stands on its own. First up is a short piece about an early ascent of Ktaadn, followed by a longer one on the Allegash & East Branch. If you read nothing else, open it to the middle of pg 22 (& ends on 23). It will take 1 minute and enthrall you with observations and the call of the Wild Boreal North Woods as they were long before roads or even trails and certainly before the great northern paper companies cut their unending swaths through virgin lands. His reflections on the ponds and natives (the Brookies) are as intimate and priceless as the jewels themselves. His opine references to the Greeks are as relevant today as they were then or 4,000 years ago. I first came across a copy in the White House Library (at a dinner reception i could not resist seeing what comforted our leaders during long & troubled nights). It took me several years to track down a copy but it was worth the process.

Do not read this and compare it to Walden or as a some window into Thoreau, but for sheer joy of kicking off the canoe at Telos and the wonder of the north country.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No


9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Live Like a Philosopher, November 9, 2003
This review is from: The Maine Woods (Penguin Nature Library) (Paperback)
This screed from Thoreau is obviously not as classic as his work on Walden, but here we may be seeing the beginning of the travelogue business. Thoreau is often misrepresented (by those who haven't read his works, or have read them too many times) as a hardcore back-to-nature hermit who lived off the land and rejected civilization. One read of his Walden story disproves that stereotype, and in this work about three trips to Maine's wild country, we can surely see Thoreau's social side all the more. At the time, the Maine Woods were surely a thrilling landscape ripe for exploration and adventure, and Thoreau gives us an enjoyable travelogue of his ramblings and recreations. A bonus is great coverage of the Indians of the area, especially Thoreau's longtime traveling colleague Joe Polis. The only problem here is that Thoreau's introspective naturalist philosophy is mostly missing at this stage of his career, and he pretty much accidentally invents descriptive travel writing instead. This is still a worthy exploration if you're interested in the Maine Woods either as they were then or if you wish to explore them today. But Thoreau's classic naturalism is better found in his other works. [~doomsdayer520~]
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews 
Was this review helpful to you? Yes No

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
 
 
 
Most Recent Customer Reviews








Only search this product's reviews



Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
ON the 31st of August, 1846, I left Concord in Massachusetts for Bangor and the backwoods of Maine, by way of the railroad and steamboat, intending to accompany a relative of mine, engaged in the lumber trade in Bangor, as far as a dam on the west branch of the Penobscot, in which property he was interested. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
forked stakes, burnt lands, dead stream, moose meat, moose tracks, dozen rods
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
East Branch, Moosehead Lake, Mud Pond, Chamberlain Lake, Mount Kineo, Uncle George, Webster Stream, Francis Indian, New York, Telos Lake, Pine Stream, Grand Lake, New England, Ambejijis Lake, Five Islands, Second Lake, Ambejijis Falls, Chesuncook Lake, Deer Island, Joe Aitteon, Penobscot River, Sugar Island, Oak Hall, Quakish Lake, Shad Pond
New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats
Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:



Books on Related Topics (learn more)

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Tags Customers Associate with This Product

 (What's this?)
Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
 

Your tags: Add your first tag
 

Customer Discussions

This product's forum
Discussion Replies Latest Post
No discussions yet

Ask questions, Share opinions, Gain insight
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
Search all Amazon discussions
   
Related forums





Look for Similar Items by Category


Look for Similar Items by Subject