Customer Reviews

Walden: Introduction and Annotations by Bill McKibben (Concord Library)

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I've read Walden at least a dozen times and it just keeps getting better.

Thanks to the truly inspirational thoughts in this book, I have learned to be alone in the woods and high wilderness and feel nothing but joy and awe. Fear doesn't enter into it. It's only people and "civilization" that bring me angst. Thoreau taught me how to use my mind to see beyond the surface of nature into its glorious inner workings, and few gifts have ever been so precious in my life.

There is so much wisdom here it's impossible to digest it all even in a dozen readings. Lines from this book come to me over and over as life rolls along. One of my favorites states that HDT would be happy to live in a pine box, three feet by six feet, as long as he could wake up every morning in the middle of nature. I know exactly what he means, and I have patterned my life along that vein of simplicity and sustainability.

For that and so many other thoughts here, I love Thoreau like a real brother. He's always there when I need him. It's okay that Walden was closer to town than most think; the real point here is letting wild nature enter into you until you become part of it and no longer part of the illusory world of homo sap. That can be done even in a city park if one learns how.

This book, along with the best of HDT's journals, constitute some of the most useful of all American literature to my mind, and to millions of others over the last century-plus.

Thanks to Hank for understanding what really matters, and for waking up an entire nation to how precious our natural heritage is.

I read this book when I was 16. I found myself fascinated with Thoreau's simplistic living, and overall, his philosophical awareness. He was sure of his purpose in life and meant to live by the expectations only he held dear. I believe he wanted us, the readers, to realize that a man with so much potential and ability doesn't always have the desire to use it. Life is too short to waste on anything less than what makes us pleased with ourselves. We all know deep down what's right from wrong, how we really feel towards life and everyone who lives in it. A good life is the ability to live with total assurance that what we do is worth our struggle maintaining it.

It changed the way I think, whether it be his intention to do so or not. It was the reminder for me that I am human, and in no way insignificant.

Not sure why it took me 39 years to read this book, but glad I just did. It's one of the most honest and inspiring books I've ever read, and I've finished a dozen books just the past few months. It could have been called "How man should live". If you are in touch with nature in any way, this book is for you.

You'd not expect a person to talk of woods and animals for 200+ pages, but he easily does. Deep in the woods. But it's not just a camping manual. This is a philosophy and perspective on life, of living simply, and letting others live. It's about taking twenty minutes to watch a chipmunk gather nuts, or a bird retrieve the makings of a nest. It's slowing life down, and appreciating the many miracles that happen around us outdoors many times a day.

This book has been published countless times through the years, and it will continue to connect with people for generations. It makes you realize that minus technology, little has changed in 150 years. Many books are called a classic, this one is.

Great ideas in a mixed format, some great observations presented in poetic
verse and some rant with confused presentation. Overall a great treatise
on getting back to the basics and in touch with nature to get in touch with
onself.

Book came just in time! It was just as described and quick shipment. Always nice to be handled efficiently, Thank you!

There's nothing new to say, Thoreau discovered it all, and there's nothing new for me to add to more than a century of critique. This is unsurpassed. How could he have known so much at his age? Genius.

A poignant peek into one man's view of what is and should be the true importance of every man's existence. Thoreau in the 1800s already felt, in my opinion, strangled by too much, unnecessary stimuli. Once out in the woods, on his own, with just the basic necessities, he was able to reconnect with his true self. I can only imagine what he would think of today's world. Definitely worth reading.

Reading through the pages of this book makes you wonder if the author was a hermit and a heretic or a social reformer, or a mystical philosopher. "On Walden Pond" sounds similar to the classic movie "On Golden Pond," starring Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn. There are some similarities; in both stories the lead characters go and live near a secluded lake (pond) to spend their lives, but Thoreau goes a step forward to find himself and his soul when he can't accept the status quo of life. His journey is to find the truth that is beyond the apparent reality: A search for transcendental truth of Bhagavadgita and Upanishads. His search for the nature of soul is found in the tranquility of Walden Pond when he states that, "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose com¬position years of the gods have elapsed, and in com¬parison with which our modem world and its litera¬ture seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our con¬ceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! There I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Temate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander (the Great) only heard the names." Through these passages he compares himself to the great Vedic sages and rishis who meditated deep in the woods for prolonged period of time in total tranquility to realize spiritual awakening. Thoreau was a prophet who had the same identity crisis as his better known contemporaries like; Emerson, Whitman, Channing, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson. But among these men, Thoreau was forerunner as practitioner. He insisted that knowledge without experience or action is a false knowledge.

Thoreau's passion to seek inner meaning of life is illustrated by his disappointment in the traditional Christian culture; "We have adopted Chris¬tianity merely as an improved method of agriculture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten." In another paragraph he observes; "For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to glorify God and enjoy him forever." In another section of the book, Thoreau writes, "We perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality. This is always ex¬hilarating and sublime. By closing the eyes and slum¬bering, and consenting to be deceived by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and habit every where, which still is built on purely il¬lusory foundations." He continues in the later part of the paragraph, "I have read in a Hindoo book, that there was a king's son, who, be¬ing expelled in infancy from his native city, was brought up by a forester, and, growing up to ma¬turity in that state, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered him, revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul," continues the Hindoo philosopher, "from the circumstances, in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it by some holy teacher, and then it knows itself to be Brahme. I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things."

Thoreau was also keenly interested in the work Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. In many ways he resembled Darwin in his patient observations and Benjamin Franklin in his inventive practicality. Unlike most transcendentalists, he could do things, tend to garden and make home repairs for Emerson, or actualize the real carpentry Branson Alcott's fanciful vision of a summer house.

Thoreau expresses strong belief in social reforms when he refuses to pay taxes in protest against practice of slavery in Southern States. He championed abolitionist John Brown whom he met briefly in Concord, Massachusetts. In one paragraph he laments; "I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous,.." "There are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave driver of your soul."

1. Civil Disobedience
2. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson & Henry David Thoreau
3. Henry David Thoreau : A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Walden; Or, Life in the Woods / The Maine Woods / Cape Cod (Library of America)

...not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Paragraph one sets the scene: Thoreau says that when he wrote "the bulk" of the book, he "lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor...on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusettes..." for a period of "two years and two months." In this first chapter, entitled Economy, he talks a lot about how much stuff cost to build and grow, and describes his living conditions. Early on, he shares his philosophy on what it is (p 12) "[t]o be a philosopher." It is "...to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust."

Although I'm glad that I can now check the "I read Walden," box, doing so involved more drudgery than delight. For one thing, Thoreau seems to ramble a lot. For another, he's a paradoxical guy. He disdainfully emphasizes a lack of intelligence in others, as when he refers to some of his visitors as (p 142) "half-witted men," and one specifically as "an inoffensive, simple-minded pauper;" seemingly rudely directs those stopping by his place for a cup of water to the pond, "I told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a dipper;" claims of certain unfortunates he offered assistance that they (p 67) "preferred to remain poor;" and admits that charity isn't his thing, (p 67) "As for Doing-good...I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution;" but later philosophizes, (p 205) "Goodness is the only investment that never fails." He repeatedly uses the racist term (p 27, etc.) "savages" to refer to Native Americans, yet states that he aided a runaway slave (p 144) "I helped to forward toward the north star." He seems sort of straight-laced, but also funny, as when he mocks the men that built the Pyramids (p 53) "there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs." And even his logic can be illogical, as in his support of the statement (p 48) "the swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot." The example is that traveling 30 miles is better done on foot due to the hassle and cost ("almost a day's wages") of taking the train. By my calculation, at three miles an hour, a 30-mile journey would take 10 hours, more for a man like Thoreau who was afflicted with tuberculosis.

Although Thoreau's story contains noteworthy quotes throughout, the last chapter is filled with pearls, like this inspiring (and quite famous) one, (p 303) "...if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours," which proves to be an enjoyable end to an uneasy read. It was only afterwards, during my book club's discussion session, that I first heard Thoreau's self-proclaimed life of solitude was not as solitary as one might think. This led me to pick up (but only skim) The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan, a good choice for those that feel compelled to learn more about the supposed recluse. Worst of the book was annotator Bill McKibben's occasional opinion-laced footnote, including the one on page 252, in which he feels compelled to share that Louisa May Alcott's father was a "fruitcake." My advice, skip this version in favor of any other. Those that enjoyed Walden may also like: The Thoreau You Don't Know by Robert Sullivan, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, and Gilead by Marilynne Robinson.

This book would be a good presentation of the classic Walden if you tore out the introduction by Bill Kibben. While the annotations are helpful, the introduction is over the top, making out Thoreau as an environmentalist and climate change advocate. Totally self-serving on the part of McKibben. Thoreau was certainly a thinker outside the box, but an environmentalist he was not. To suppose that in this day he would be an advocate of climate change is laughable. Look for a true copy of Walden without the garbage added.