Aho! Hello-Cherokee Language
These books and literature are just the kind that should be mandatory in educational classrooms. They seem second to a bible. The writer is very direct and strong spirited. As well as many of the other titles that I have explored, I have a very good bookshelf collection that I would suggest to any person in hopes of expanding their horizon... In fact, I have made a habit of giving this literature as gifts.
One especially excellent book about the preserving of Walden Pond and Woods,included amazing writings from Musical Artist Don Henley {The Eagles}. He states the strength of his thoughts and feelings about his beliefs of preserving nature and the making goodness out of society.
For a writer {Ralph Waldo Emerson}so far back in years, he seems to have been "born before his time", knowing so much about what we need.
Most enchanting....
"Peace is not only a season, it is also a way of life."
"Mundo Wigo" The Creator Is Good-Mohegan Language

This book has the most complete selection of Thoreau's poetry that I have been able to find. I found it absolutely amazing. Thoreau uses such simple words to convey a deep and complex message that not many people can pull off. He brings what he has seen to life and makes the words dance, laugh, sing and weep as they flow off the page. One of my favorite quotes from this book that reminds me of Oscar Wilde is"Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it." So don't take my word for it, read it and fall in love for yourself.

This book introduces Thoreau's philosophy to the young reader (ages 7-10) through the eyes of the 10-year-old boy who helped him move to the woods at Walden Pond. The illustrations are charming.

Astonishing that so many pages of such great writing (and such wonderful, interesting annotations) can be purchased for so little money. We have needed an inexpensive annotated edition of Thoreau's best short prose for a very long time, and this clearly fits the bill. Teachers and students, in particular, will find this book extraordinarily useful. The Thoreau material and annotations alone are extraordinarily valuable, but Hyde's excellent introduction on Thoreau's "Prophetic Excursions" make this the best deal available for a Thoreau book. Buy it; you'll be glad you did!

Because Henry David Thoreau's work is in the public domain, it's easy to run across any number of compilations of his most profound or most quotable words. Perhaps these mini-anthologies are simpler to digest than, say, every single page of _Walden_, or every one of the 14 volumes of his _Journal_. Let's face it: most people don't get or take the chance to read either one. So it's nice that Laurence Stapleton took the time to read the _Journal_ and select crucial parts for us to study. Here Thoreau is at his best in describing his neighbors or his walks around Concord and his art of observing Nature. His recordings are mostly made under what most people would consider adverse conditions: in fog, in rain, in snow, or at night. He notices phenomena reflected only in the water of a pond or the ice-covering of a wintry field. He is a practiced "seer," and his writing inspires the reader to see as well.

His writing. Of course! This book is subtitled _A Writer's Journal_ for good reason. Stapleton specifically picked out many entries where Thoreau ruminates about his own writing and the creative process. To this end, this book reads like a 19th-century _Chicken Soul for the Writer's Soul_. Anyone who writes can identify with considerations like these:

"The best you can write will be the best you are. Every sentence is the result of a long probation. The author's character is read from title-page to end. Of this he never corrects the proofs." (Feb. 28, 1841)

"We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto. The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of the whole man, that our speech may be vascular. The intellect is powerless to express thought without the aid of the heart and the liver and of every member." (Sept. 2, 1851)

"Write often, write upon a thousand themes, rather than long at a time, not trying to turn too many feeble somersaults in the air,--and so come down upon your head at last." (Nov. 12, 1851)

"I wish that I could buy at the shops some kind of india-rubber that would rub out at once all that in my writing which it now costs me so many perusals, so many months if not years, and so much reluctance, to erase." (Dec. 27, 1853)

"Time never passes so quickly and unaccountably as when I am engaged in composition, i.e. in writing down my thoughts. Clocks seem to have been put forward." (Jan. 27, 1858)

"The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands." (Feb. 13, 1860)

(Is he speaking to *us* or to *himself*?) We also see publication notes of the two books released during Thoreau's lifetime, _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_ and _Walden_. We read discourses and ramblings that will later become essays like "Slavery in Massachusetts" and "A Plea for Captain John Brown." The latter are served without any intrusion from the editor, so the savvy reader might need to brush up on pre-Civil War history to put the words into context. Thoreau's discussions about putting pen to paper make the audience feel almost guilty for spending time reading, not writing. A volume that can be appreciated by nature-lovers, contemporary transcendentalists and writers alike.

Mr Rothwell, hats off to you! You have made a fine-toothed culling of all that is most sublime in Thoreau's Journals and closest to the spirit of Walden. That is to say, you have spirited out the passages which capture Thoreau's Transcendental other-worldliness and (paradoxically) love of the natural world at the same time.-Thoreau was so enraptured with Time that I'm surprised that more comparisons with Proust have not been made. I suppose it's the difference between the men and their modes of expression. But for Thoreau, as for Proust, we live in a mysterious whirlwind transporting us from one "self" to another with the speed of a Concorde. We live, of course, in Time.-My favorite entry is "November Thoughts" in which Thoreau reflects upon travel: "It was as if I was promised the greatest novelty the world has ever seen or shall see, though the utmost possible novelty would be the difference between me and myself a year ago...And yet there is no more tempting novelty than this new November. No going to Europe or another world to be named with it....Think of the consumate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here."-We, in this ever so fleeting life, are transiting from self to self in the dimension of time at a speed that dwarfs anything available in the other dimensions and which, moreover, is more wondrous and even terrifying when we consider its implications. - Perhaps this is why we turn a blind eye to it and go gadding about all over.- Thoreau was especially attuned to this form of travel, as Emerson said at his elegy he had a "sixth sense" for such things. This selection is a MUST for all Thoreauvians. It is laced with such insights of which I have only been able to cover this one.

This is a book for two kinds of readers. Those who are particularly drawn to Thoreau will find a provocative thesis on which to hang all of his various pursuits. Tauber approaches him as a historian and philosopher of science, and shows how Thoreau was reacting against a rising tide of positivism - a form of radical objectivity -- to preserve his individualistic perspective on the world. Whether he was doing natural history or cultural history, Thoreau collected facts and assembled them to uniquely construct his own view of nature or culture. But Thoreau is only a foil for Tauber's larger purposes. Tauber's major theme is that all knowledge is value-laden and we choose the values by which to know the world and live in it. The fact/value distinction, so important in much of philosophy of science, is brought together here. This thesis is of interest, not only to understand Thoreau, but for a very much wider set of concerns. Tauber is charting out a post-critical understanding of the nature of knowledge, building on two philosophies: Michael Polanyi's "tacit mode" of understanding and Emanuel Levinas's ethical metaphysics. The first argues that the conditions that make knowing possible are not "foundational" or can ever be made explicit, but rather are embedded in individual experience and common social life; from this source, explicit knowledge is created. The second thesis maintains that values determine how we encounter the world and ultimately know it. These themes are not novel to contemporary philosophy, but when posed in present debates about the nature of reality, the claims of relativism, and the problematic status of the self, Tauber's synthesis offers a way out of the maze of postmodernism to new assertions about the primacy of the person. Thoreau is used to demonstrate how the postmodern challenge has its origins in the romanticism and that the responses offered then, when understood in the light of 20th century developments, takes on new significance. This is an ambitious book: The Thoreau lover will find some of the philosophy challenging and the philosophically inclined will find the focus on Thoreau potentially distracting. But each will find their efforts well paid: the first will understand Thoreau in a new way, and the second will see a philosophy enacted in a rarely realized illustration.

"Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

With these words, Henry Thoreau ended his world-famous masterpiece, "Walden", neatly summarizing the essence of both his book and his life: that we are all on a journey of awakening to the divine fullness of Life. Like the writings of great saints and mystics through time, "Walden" is less one man's philosophical musings than it is the ecstatic outpouring of a soul that has "dipped into the well of eternal Truths" and held up the dipper for the rest of us to drink from.

But the real wonder of "Walden" is that it speaks even more to the problems of our nation today than it did 150 years ago -- that we are living "lives of quiet desperation", our souls drowning in a sea of materialism and media messages, our natural environment poisoned and obliterated before our slightly-open eyes. We are out of touch with the rhythms of nature and with our own beingness.

Yet Thoreau does not merely describe the problems of our time, he gives specific solutions -- solutions that are increasingly respoken if not practiced: Follow a different drummer. Follow not your neighbor nor your parents nor anyone else, but follow the genius within yourself. Sit still and listen to the divine music within. Simplify.

There's a reason Thoreau's "Walden" has never been out of print since the 1860's, and possibly never will: it's a message we need to hear, more than ever.

Winslow Homer's watercolors perfectly complement Thoreau's works. For someone new to Thoreau's poetry, it is an enchanting collection sure to engage, capturing the essence of New England nature, and Transcendentalist philosophy. It is a beautiful tribute to two who were masters of their crafts.

The photography in this book is spectacular! It is what you expect from a Sierra Club book. Put together with wonderfully thoughtful and though-provoking texts by various writers, this book can give even a hard-core city slicker pause. Wilderness at its best....words to salve the heart.