I really enjoyed Walden, it's a very deep philosophical book. Thoreau is very insightful, and he is also very intelligent. I admire his capability to digress on different subjects and expand on the topics. His profound statments make an individual contemplate and search his inner soul for his true identity. This book, if read carefully and with much thought, can really impact one's life. It can help one search themselves and think differently about life in general. I would encourage people to read this book if they have a good grasp on their life because it could be confusing and somewhat depressing at times, depending on the maturity level of the individual. If one has an interest to read this, it can be very enjoyable, and challenging at the same time.

Mind you, this isn't idle worship - this book is a masterpiece of American Literature, and along with 'Civil Disobedience', represents one of the greatest literary minds America has ever known. Thoreau stands with Dickinson, Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman as one of the greats of his era. Indeed, in the 1850's when 'Walden' was originally published, it occasionally sat beside 'Moby-Dick' and 'Song of Myself' on book shop shelves. In reading Thoreau, one comes to understand the scholar and the naturalist that have so profoundly come together next to Walden Pond; their combination seems to express some of the most basic underpinnings of American life. More than that however, their intertwining through insight and spiritualism evokes a thoughtful reverence for life in its entirety. Thoreau's ruminations are striking, not merely for their deep beauty and sentiment, but for their delving examination of the human soul. The way in which he blends the substantive and the sublime, bringing the reader to Walden Pond in mind, body, and soul, deserves praise as one of the highest forms of art. One cannot help but wonder at the depth - of Thoreau, of the spirit, and of Walden Pond.

May be a good starting point....The United States in 1800 by Henry Adams. First Six Chapters of Vol.1

Adams' work here ranks with Macaulay and Carlyle in terms of telling an intricate history through the private letters and conversations of the players involved. From the first pages where he describes the America over which Jefferson presided, Adams clearly defines idealogies and principles as they were defended and practiced by the Federalists and Republicans of the day. Throughout Jefferson's two terms, the president was forced to abandon favorite principles and to defend others that were ulimately (if not immediately) untenable. Through skillful hands we watch how moods changed and policies switched, and how the main characters attempted to reconcile their inconsistencies. Jefferson hoped to expose the wrongfulness of Federalist policies, yet wound up forwarding the same tenets in his management. The President who rose to such a height of popularity and power left the office as disgraced and as generally disliked as any Chief Executive before or after. A masterful work about eight important and formative years in the early republic.

Even though it was written in the 1880s, this is the best history of early American diplomacy yet written. It is important to mention that this is primarily a diplomatic history, and it certainly reflects the author's interest and family history in foreign affairs. Adams has meticulously researched all matters of State and diplomacy, but he has reserved the topics of culture, economics, and education for far more subjective analysis. It becomes obvious early in the text that Adams is highly deferential to Great Britain, and the young American republic is constantly compared and trivialized, in contrapuntal regularity, against the great European powers. Adams has a lot to say about America's poverty, provincialism, and anti-intellectualism when compared to England, France, and Russia. American culture cringe pervades the text. While frequently accurate, he drives the point to excess: America becomes somewhat of a play-thing for the imperial ambitions of Europe. We're treated to page after page of material on the British ambassadors. In short, this is probably the kind of American history we would have expected Henry James and T. S. Eliot to have read, the kind that gets all the facts and dates right but can't conceal the author's sincere desire to be English.

Lately, I've come to really like the writings of Thoreau. It has taken me several years to return to this author...after being forced to read excerpts from Thoreau at a ridiculously fast pace during high school. Little time to read and less time for reflection left a bad impression of Thoreau in my mind that has, as I said, only recently been overcome.

But now, upon my return, I have found "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" by Henry David Thoreau to be a very invigorating book...one to be savored and not read too quickly. Taken at a good pace, it has been a joy.

While transcendentalism still strikes me as a rather facile and egotistical philosophy, I have really come to see and appreciate the mystical quality in Thoreau's works. Like most mystical authors, Thoreau is not always engrossing--he is actually rather tedious in points, but his work is punctuated by passages of sheer brilliance.

Seeing nature through Henry's eyes has been a wake up call to me personally. This book breathes excitement and lust for life upon the reader. Even his long winded discussions of different kinds of fish serve to alert me to my own lack of wonder. This world, even in its current subjection to futility , is still a wonderful creation. Nature (and Thoreau's picture of these rivers especially) echo the declaration of the Psalmist: "The heavens are telling of the glory of God; And their expanse is declaring the work of His hands" (Psalm 19:1).

I highly recommend this wonderful book.

Thoreau sought the seclusion of the pond to write *this* book, not _Walden_. In 19th-century terms, this treatise is a modified travelogue based on a 13-day boat trip that Henry and his brother John took in 1839. By today's standards, contemporary editors and many an English teacher would decorate this manuscript with red ink and admonish the author that he strays too often and too far from the main subject. Bill Bryson's essays wander too, but he doesn't usually reach back and quote the Bhagavad-Gita, Homer, Chaucer, or Shakespeare. But whenever Henry takes in his surroundings, he is reminded of something else, and before you know it a serious discourse is off and running, and it has nothing to do with floating upstream or down. He expresses his opinions or offers his knowledge about fish, mythology, religion, poetry, reading, writing, history, government, traveling, waterfalls, friendship, love, life, nature, art, dreams, and science. He reminisces about a previous trip to the Berkshires and a sail down the Connecticut River. He breaks into poetry at whim -- sometimes his own words, more often someone else's. Along the way, the brothers paddle from Concord, Massachusetts, to the area around Concord, New Hampshire, and then turn around and go home. We meet some of the people they encounter along the way and get a glimpse of New England life during that time period. In some respects, the people and the land haven't changed much at all. We can see Thoreau's environmentalism when he talks about dams and their effects on the habits and habitats of fish -- concerns that are still with us today. We can laugh at his puns and enjoy his wordplay (i.e., "The shallowest still water is unfathomable" and Man needs "not only to be spiritualized, but *naturalized*, on the soil of earth.") Above all, we can explore these rivers and shorelines during a time period that we will never see personally, with the aid of a native naturalist who's in the habit of sharing his observations and thoughts.

Read _Walden_ first. And if you find you enjoy Henry's take on nature and civilization and life and living, pick up _A Week_. There are a few gems lurking in here that you might connect with.

[From Boating on the Catawba...in the
"Musketaquid"]

I will take the definite role of the
Nay-Sayer in the long line of aficianados
and idolators who insist that *Walden* is
Henry David Thoreau's masterpiece...
I will simply state that this work and
"Life Without Principle" are his great
contributions to literature, thought, and
value...

Take this quote from "Life Without Principle"
(before I get to 'A Week...'):
"To speak impartially, the best men that
I know are not serene, a world in themselves.
For the most part, they dwell in forms, and
flatter and study effect only more finely
than the rest. We select granite for the
underpinning of our houses and barns; we
build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves
rest on an underpinning of granite.
we do not teach one another the lessons of
honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or
of steadiness and solidity that the rocks
do. The fault is commonly mutual, however;
for we do not habitually demand any more of
each other."

If that is not "preaching," but in the
sense of a prophet, not a mere sermonizer,
then there hasn't been any in a long time.
But Father Mapple's sermon in 'Moby-Dick' is
right up there with it.

If I had only known of Thoreau [and I had
not read much of him (and little then)except
at the University] and had to believe that
Thoreau was just what he seems to be in
'Walden,' then I would have given the man
short shrift...because there is not enough
of any sort of heart or soul in that work
to believe that he is even human. But
fortunately, a Thoreau worshipper (or rather,
*Walden* worshipper) forced me, by his own
imperious egotism, to try to understand this
man Thoreau and his views. It is fortunate
that I did, for I discovered 'A Week....'

This Penguin Classics edition is excellent
in a number of ways -- the two most important
being the notes in the back which explain the
allusions, and ancient Latin and Greek sources
and excerpts(for those who might not know them)
which Thoreau quotes and sometimes translates;
and the incredible "Introduction" by the editor,
H. Daniel Peck.
He can say his wondrous words himself:

"There is good reason for 'A Week's open
acknowledgment of the attritions of time
and loss. Conceived initially as a travel
book, 'A Week' was immeasurably deepened into
an elegiac account of experience by a tragic
event that occurrred in Thoreau's life in
the period following the 1839 voyage. In
1842, Thoreau's companion on that voyage,
his brother John, died suddenly, and in
agonizing pain, from lockjaw.
Without question this was the greatest loss
that Thoreau ever was to suffer. (He seems
to have undergone, in the aftermath of his
brother's death, a sympathetic case of the
illness that caused John's death, and the few
entries that appear in his journal in this
period are desperately mournful.) Interestingly,
though the pronoun 'we' characterizes the
narrator often in the book, the brother's
name is never mentioned -- an indication perhaps
of Thoreau's enduring need to distance himself
from this loss. there is nothing in 'A Week'
that directly refers to the death of John Thoreau.
Instead, his memory is evoked through various
symbolic strategies. For example, the long
digression on friendship in the chaper
'Wednesday' surely is intended to reflect the
intimacy Thoreau shared with his brother. Even
the ubiquitious 'we' of the narrator's voice
speaks to this intimacy. So intertwined are
the two brothers' identities in this pronoun
that it is often difficult to tell whether a
given action has been taken by Henry or John,
or both at once."

"To emphasize the elegiac aspects of 'A Week'
is to remind ourselves that throughout Western
history, rivers -- and voyages upon them --
have served as metaphors of transience and
mortality. Yet, as I indicated earlier,
'A Week' is not solely a mournful book. Its
rivers also support a spiritual buoyancy, and
provide the setting for exploration and adventure.
Most important, however, the book's larger
structure enables it to 'transcend and redeem'
the individual losses that it recounts."

[wonderful writing here!]
"In general, the outward-bound voyage of 'A Week'
dramatizes the writer's encounter with time and
its losses; on that voyage, he pays close
attention to the shore -- which, in its discreet
scenes of spoliation and historical change,
symbolizes the passage of time. The homeward
voyage, on the other hand, suggests assimilation,
resolution, and renewal. If the primary mode of
perception on the outward voyage had been
observation (of the shore), then the primary
mode of the return voyage is contemplation.
Now we are involved in an inward exploration,
and, symbolically, our vision leaves the shore
and returns to the river and the flow of
consciousness that it represents."
-- H. Daniel Peck; "Introduction."

This book is a mixture of biography and collected works of Richard Bruce Nugent, the most openly gay writer of the Harlem Renaissance. His 1920s story, "Smoke, Lillies and Jade" has been called the first African-American fictional account regarding homosexuality. The book also includes many photos of Nugent and his gay peers as well as Nugent's artwork.

The book is divided into five sections, emphasizing Nugent's fictional and non-fictional work. However, the best part of the book is the historical introduction; it should have been highlighted somehow. This book is a veritable "Who's Who?" of the Gay Harlem Renaissance. Unfortunately, this excellent documentation of the numerous gay Black authors writing in the early 20th century leaves the impression that little is known about Nugent or little is worth saying. Still, I found myself wanting to read every footnote because they show how much material is out there that has yet to be reviewed scholastically. Heads up, gay studies graduate students!

Though the excerpts of Nugent's writings span a fifty-year period, the grand majority of it comes from the 1930s. Nugent, in "Smoke" and most other writings, was a blatant cheerleader for the Renaissance. I found his work challenging, though at times incredibly boring. It's admitted that his artwork is faux Erte, but it's implied homoeroticism must truly be relished. Be warned that it's very campy. I applaud Nugent in his continual inclusion of women in his artwork, non-fiction, and fiction. You would never have to worry about him saying some foolishness like "Hated it!" Besides, if I read this correctly, Nugent never went to college, yet his writing is quite sophisticated.

Surprisingly, this book reminds me of Little Richard's biography, even though that was written during one of Richard's homophobic stages. Both Richard and Nugent were/are frequently X-rated in order to get laughs and push the envelope on societal norms. Like Dennis Rodman, Nugent swears that because Blacks rejected him, he only pursued "Latins." This fetishization may really disturb gay Latino and Italian-American readers. But remember: gay whites of the era like E.M. Forster also celebrated "difference" in ways that we would now deem politically incorrect.

Skip Gates' forward is scant, but it does reprove his commitment to an anti-homophobic, African-American scholarship. The biographer is a white gay man "interested" in Black culture. Shockingly, he never cites Eric Garber, the non-Black scholar who was the first in gay studies to report on the gay underpinnings of the Harlem Renaissance. It's a shame too, because many of Garber's insights are still useful, yet they go unacknowledged. Wirth includes a section in which Nugent remembers Carl Van Vecten, the gay white celebrity-maker who promoted the Renaissance. This section is confusing and says little. It somewhat re-centers Van Vechten and feels slightly Eurocentric. Still, the biographer has a Ph.D. in chemistry from CalTech yet he writes like the most sophisticated gay studies Ph.D. I give him much credit.

Finally, this book has been categorized under "racially mixed persons." Though it is mentioned that Nugent had some Native American ancestors, interracial romantic liaisons and passing come up much more often than multiracial identity matters in this text.

All people who want to challenge the idea that gayness is a "white thing" or "recent phenomenon" need to read this book.

Exciting, thorough, and amazingly generous, Wirth brings to life a most beguiling participant in the Harlem Renaissance.

It is a wonderful idea to make available recordings of great speeches. I hope we have more of this in the future.
In the case of older speeches, the selection is very good, considering the restraints of time, and the readers are uniformly excellent.
As for the modern speeches, it is a marvel of technology that we can hear these speeches as delivered. It is incredible that we can hear the voice of William Jennings Bryan. I can listen to Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" a thousand times and never tire of it! How I wish I could listen to the voice of Patrick Henry! But this selection is too heavily weighted to the modern, and many of those do not deserve billing as the GREATEST speeches of ALL TIME. Also, some of the modern speeches which are included are abridged, e.g. Reagan is cut off in the middle of a sentence, while lengthy and undeserving speeches are played out in their entirety.
Also, with only a few exceptions, the selection is almost entirely American. It is hard to understand why Jimmy Carter's lengthy speech on energy policy is included, while Pericles' funeral oration is not; or why only a small portion of a single Winston Churchill speech is included; why while Bill Clinton's complete 1993 pulpit address, in excess of 20 minutes, is included.
It would be helpful if the complete list of speeches were available to online buyers, as it would be to shoppers in a brick and mortar store.

I have listened to this collection twice now, both times with pleasure. Hearing the acutal voices of Amelia Earhart, Rev. Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill and Neil Armstrong made a deeper connection than simply reading their words. The collection showcases different subjects and many times contrasts opposing viewpoints of the ideas. This volume is a fantastic introduction to the moving ideals and sometimes sad truths that have influenced Western Civilization.

Near the end of the wild and free days on the plains, when the bison were almost gone and the Indians were moved to the reservations to starve and die, a man of courage and decency realized that a great people and culture were about to be exterminated by a corrupt branch of the federal government. Thomas Henry Tibbles devoted the later half of his life to fighting the federal bureaucracy which was systematically murdering the remanants of the Ponca Indians. The book tells Mr Tibbles story from his youth as farm child in Ohio and Illinois, his adventures in bleeding Kansas before the civil war, the years he spent with several tribes in Kansas and Nebraska and finally his winning fight to free the Indians from the corrupt reservation system. The story of his time with the Indians is well worth reading. Mostly, this is a great story of a man devoted to a worthwhile cause.

This book hit all the aspects of lawn care. The best part about this book was it gave good instrucitons on how to cure disease, weeds, and fungus problems without chemicals. I highly recommend this book for lawn care professionals interested in learning about the industry. This book is well worth the money.

Mary Leefe Laurence' childhood experiences on various military posts during the American Indian Wars, 1878-1890 was facinianting because it "fleshed out" the American soldier of the period and filled in the blanks of life on a remote Western post when the men were not fighting Indians. Ms. Laurence' Victorian politeness still left gaps that today's writers would have filled in. Mr. Smith's excellent editing and annotations caused me to read this book with two bookmarks to gather every bit of inforation available, much the same way I would read one of Dan Thrapp's books on this period.

Fiorello H. La Guardia may have been the greatest leader of urban government in American history. His tireless enthusiasm and talent for getting things done ranks him as a giant in the pantheon of American political leaders. Thomas Kessner's book, on the balance, does a good job describing what made La Guardia tick and how he tried to improve the city. Readable, informative.

This book provides fascinating sketches of four prominent individuals who lived during the time of England's King Charles I and the British Commonwealth. Two are Royalists, and two are Puritans/Commonwealthmen which makes for a balanced book. I actually learned a lot about the political issues at stake during the English Civil War through reading these four fascinating sketches. Rowse writes in a witty and engaging style which makes this book a pleasure to read.