Customer Reviews

A Wider View of the Universe: Henry Thoreau's Study of Nature (Environment Human Condition)

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I may not be completely qualified to review this right now, but since surprisingly no one else ever has, I'll do it anyway. My hesitancy is due to the fact that a few years ago, I read about 3/4 of this book and set it aside. I've just finished it in the past couple days.

As both a Thoreau and nature enthusiast, I was very excited about this book when I started it. In a sense, it serves as a Thoreau biography but it's one which is focused on his relationship with the natural world at different points in his life more than his relationships with people or his political philosophy.

The sections where the author explores Thoreau's life and connection to nature were uniformly interesting to me. Oddly, where I got bogged down was a lengthy chapter in which the author consolidates Thoreau's journal references to nature events around the Concord River into an account of a year. Watching nature change is exciting to me; a fairly dry account of it changing, much less so.

Along with the journal, the most relevant Thoreau companions to this book would be a collection of his natural history essays, and the two manuscripts he was working on in his final years and which were eventually edited by the late Bradley Dean under the titles Faith in a Seed, and Wild Fruits. These were written as Thoreau was discovering on his own the type of interrelationships we now call ecology.

Although not as uniformly exciting as I had first hoped, this is a book I will definitely keep and expect to read again some day. If you're interested in this aspect of Thoreau, I encourage you to read it also.