Customer Reviews

Walden

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Besides irritating formatting issues (as Mr. Wiggings mentioned in his review), I got over a quarter way through before realizing that the quotes are missing! I'd see many lines that just seemed to end with half a thought and a comma or double-dash, with nothing to punctuate his statement (price, poem, song, etc.). I just grabbed the MOBI version from Project Gutenberg ([...]) and everything seems to be in order. However be aware that THAT version has no table of contents (DOH!).

So ... it's free, yes, but you're missing out on key elements of the book if you download this.

This book should be required reading for every high school and college student in every school in the country. It is one of the most important literary contributions of our age. If you have not read it, I highly recommend it. This version is formatted very well and includes a linked Table of Contents which is especially helpful when you reread this book. regardless of whether you purchase this version for the Kindle or a print version, you won't be disappointed.

Often times a book you *should* read is one that isn't that enjoyable to read. At best, you have to work at it. The writing although informative, educational, and thought provoking is often complex, unapproachable, and drowned in archaic syntax. While not as easy reading as adult teen fiction, I'm about 1/3 of the way through and so far have been able to follow about 80% of it without needing to go back over anything or bust out my dictionary.

The Kindle format itself is great and well adapted. No strange formats, no font oddities.

As for the text, it should be pointed out that there is more to Thoreau than "simplify, simplify". His observations on the motivations and trappings of society are accurate and telling, proven even more by the fact that one hundred and fifty years have passed since its creation and little has changed.

An outstanding text for anyone wishing to get more out of life and to distill out the things that are most excellent.

This book hit me in high school like a shimmering beam of light. It made me start questing my motives for what activities I was spending my time doing, what kind of clothes I was wearing, and what things I was saying. I think like many teens a lot of my actions had to do with wanting to impress my classmates or to put up an image that I thought would make me popular. Once I read this book I couldn't go through through life without asking "why am I doing this?" over all of my important decisions. It's liberating to choose what'll make you happy, not what you think will make others like or respect you.

Just a few pages in, Thoreau puts in a few quotes from other authors, all of which are missing! This continues throughout the book, and was a deal-breaker for me. This book is about ideas, so critical elements cannot be ommitted. Walden without the quotes is like a car without wheels.

As other reviewers have noted this version is incomplete and sentences stop in the middle. It was free. My only expense was the time and effort put into discovering the shortcomings of this version.

Walden was written as a backlash against consumerism and conformity. Thoreau built his own house with affordable and left over materials and sustained himself for a very small amount of money. The philosophy that he offers is one that many of us could benefit in listening to. Do we really need the most expensive cell phone on the market, or will the free model do? Do we really need a designer bag? Does it make us any happier to buy a house that is so elaborate it will add ten more years before we can retire?

Walden questions what is truly important in life and what things are unnecessary burdens that we allow society to place on us.

I haven't picked up a free book for a while because of poor formatting issues. As I tried to read this one on my Kindle something kept bothering me. It wasn't until I was on the second page that I realized what was wrong.

For some reason the entire book is off center. The right side flows all the way to the edge of the page. However, the left side starts off away from the edge. I tried to change the font to a larger size, but this just made it more noticeable.

The text being off center doesn't seem like a big deal. However, I never got past it. It annoyed me so much that I ended up removing it from my Kindle because I just couldn't read it this way.

And `Tis a shame that I cannot claim this is a re-read after 40 years or so. I can only cite the very well-worn cliché: Better late than never.

Walden is a pond, just outside Concord, Massachusetts, and for two years in the mid-1840's Henry David Thoreau lived a largely solitary existence there, in a simple wooden cabin which he constructed. This book is a collection of his mediations on the natural world, and a person's place in it. Thoreau also ruminates on an individual's place in society and certainly demurs about the hurly-burly existence led by so many, or, in an expression that I had always attributed to T. S. Eliot, but was first coined by him: "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

The first third of the book is on "economy," and the house that he built near Walden. He describes his labor, and provides a table indicating the total cost, and compares that with the annual rental cost of housing. Similarly, he covers his food, clothing and fuel expenses (the "essentials"), and the underlying theme remains the subject verse, taken from a Shaker song, "Simple Gifts," written about the same time: if you simplify your life, and rid yourself of the bondage of so much self-imposed clutter, you really are much freer, and that includes having the opportunity to take a ramble in the woods, which was a major aspect of his two years at Walden. As Thoreau phrased it: "Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them." Or in another passage: "I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters." Contrast that with the constant exhortations of our consumer society to "buy, buy, buy" and if we can only get the American consumer spending again, our "economy" will be OK. The beauty of Thoreau is an independent mind writing against the grain of conventional thought.

Much of the latter portion of the book features his observation and outlook on the natural world around him. These observations range from the scientific to the poetic, with an emphasis on the latter, but he does not hesitate to make controlled measurements, like determining the true depth of the pond, which had previously been the subject of speculation. He describes how ice is harvested from the pond, and shipped to Boston for summer use, and is continually intrigued by the color of both the ice and the water in the pond. For those who are overwhelmed with "light pollution" and do not know what the phase of the moon is, Thoreau provides a suitable admonition: "It would be well, perhaps, if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies, if the poet did not speak so much from under a roof, or the saint dwell there so long. Birds do not sing in caves, nor do doves cherish their innocence in dovecots."

There is much else as well. He describes the life of poverty of his nearest neighbor, an Irish family who are recent immigrants. He also observes a battle between red and black ants, and plays "hide and go seek" with a loon on the lake. He leans towards vegetarianism, but praises hunting, and considers it a vital rite of passage for any boy (and yes, it was so long ago, the other half were not even considered).

Walden is not an easy read. In part it is due to the turgidity of Thoreau's prose style. There is also the aspect that portions of the book resemble the Desiderata poem that was plastered to so many bedroom walls in the 60's: a string of exhortation on the proper way to conduct one's life. The meaning of some of these aphorisms are quite understandable, for example: "While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally"? But it would take some true assumptions and extrapolations, and they could be quite divergent, to squeeze the meaning from: "The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement. Their truth is instantly translated; its literal monument alone remains. The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures." I'd welcome reader comments as to what that really means.

Walden was hardly a "commercial success" in Thoreau's lifetime, but its impact on numerous historical figures was significant. He was admired by the naturalists John Muir, Joseph Wood Krutch, Loren Eiseley, and David Brower. His companion volume, (On Civil Disobedience) influenced Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, as well as many others.

It is a book to be read slowly, with some tolerance for his style, and the occasional still quirky observations. Walden remains a 5-star read, and is an essential book for everyone to read, at least once in their life, even if it is in the latter phases.

Finally, proving that once again there are those unlikely connections that add the zest to life: each day I look 70 miles to the west, and enjoy the view of the mountain most commonly called Mt. Taylor, named after Zachary Taylor, the President of the United States who started the Mexican-American War, and is the reason this piece of earth that I inhabit is part of the USA. Henry David Thoreau practiced civil disobedience, and was briefly jailed for his failure to pay his taxes as a protest against that war.

I had to read this for a Political Science class that I am taking. This book is about getting back to basics. I recommend it to everyone.