"Oct. 22nd, 1837. 'What are you doing now?' he asked, 'Do you keep a journal?'-- So I make my first entry today." Thus begins Thoreau's Journal, made up of more then two million words and covering about twenty-five years of his life. No other work of Thoreau's better exhibits his discipline as a writer and his devotion to the natural world. In the Journal can be found the fragmented foundations of masterpieces such as Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod. But what is perhaps more interesting to a reader of Thoreau's Journal are his thoughts and insights on topics such as friendship, love, religion, nature, bravery, heroism, war, slavery, the art of writing, and, most important to Thoreau, the art of living. Anyone with any interest in Thoreau will find his Journal to be an invaluable aid in understanding and following the life of one of America's most profound prose writers

It is obvious that the present day photographer, John Dugdale, has been greatly influenced by the 19th century Transcendentalist writer, Henry David Thoreau. In this superb book of Dugdale's photographs and selections from Thoreau's journals, it is as if the writings were done specifically for the images, not over 100 years previously.

Dugdale has, for many years, been one of my favorite photographers. He uses a process for printing his photographs called cyanotype which was invented during the time that Thoreau lived and worked. The wonderful elegance and simplicity of his subjects and images fits perfectly with Thoreau's philosophies of life. Dugdale, because of HIV, is 80% blind, but, somehow, uses what sight he has combined with a pure spirituality and sight beyond the physical to create images of rare beauty.

So, we see a single rose alongside these words of Thoreau: "Love is the burden of all Nature's odes..." A still-life of flowers, two birds, which may be made of milk glass, and a human hand are viewed with Thoreau's "Perhaps what most moves us in winter is some reminiscence of far-off summer...;" a solitary man with one hand against an old, tall tree by a pond and a field are perfect for Thoreau's "Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each..." And perhaps most moving of all, part of the back of a nude man is used with Thoreau's "My life was ecstasy. In youth, before I lost any of my senses, I can remember that I was all alive, and inhabited my body with inexpressible satisfaction..."

The book begins with two short, wonderfully written appreciations of the artists by Frank Crocitto.

This collection is magnificent beyond any contemporary words. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

More than a discrete work of literary criticism, this work plays an important part in Cavell's ongoing philosophical project. If Cavell's earlier work had Wittgenstein and Austin as involving a modernist break with the dominant Anglo-American philosophical tradition of positivism, then this work exemplified how analytical philosophy might continue. Cavell finds in the word conscious text of 'Walden' a linguistic economy complimentary to the idea of a logic or necessity to ordinary language. The American Transcendentalists are recast as philosophers who anticipate the turn away from metaphysics to the ordinary and everyday to be found in Wittgenstein. At the same time, as newly recovered American philosophers, they rehearse an encounter between English (empiricist) and German (idealist) philosophy before the split between these strands became institutionalized. 'The Senses of Walden,' then, is a key philosophical text by Cavell as much as a work of literary criticism on Thoreau. It is the text of a philosopher unable to completely give up an analytical training, but equally unwilling to ignore the broader cultural issues that such training obscures. Paul Jenner, University of Nottingham.

This is Professor Cavell's loving reading of Thoreau's "Walden." I was struck by his accounting of Thoreau's daily means. There is even the general ledger that Thoreau made of his financial bearings. To live so simply in a gentle world is a scholar's dream.

A must read for people interested in the environment and how to interpret their surroundings. Beautifully written, thoughtful and intelligent. One of the best books I've read.

From a lit-crit perspective, an important distinction has to be made between Thoreau himself and his work. From a religious studies perspective, this distinction isn't as important, and we can speak of things like "Thoreau's own ecstatic wittness," as Hodder does, emphasizing the reflexive possessive. The real challenge for a Thoreau reader in Lit. class is to separate the work from the notion of Thoreau as MEANING something about himself in the work. This is difficult because he speaks in the first person, really went to Walden, and certainly believed many of his ideas. However, making this distinction between Thoreau and Thoreau's literary first person is also essential because Walden is a work of literature and as such contains a persona, a stylized voice, a structural integrity and an artistic vision in which the "I" plays an essential but not necessarily personal role. Fortunately, plenty of authors have already examined Thoreau's aesthetic sensibility, and Alan Hodder takes us in a new direction.

What Hodder does from a religious studies perspective is just as important, and also essential to deepening a literary reading of Thoreau's corpus. In fact, the Lit-Crit aesthetic perspective alone completely misses the ecstatic perspective of Thoreau's inter-religious first person voice. Arguably, Thoreau's "I" is his ecstatic witness, or rather the persona of an ecstatic witness. Hodder traces the sources of this ecstasy. This work has long been needed.

I had been reading, and admiring, this book for two years when I found out that Mr. Loewer worked on the same Environmental Show as myself: we are all vols, so it is no wonder we have never met. This book is truely a showcase of Mr. Loewer's talents': THOREAU'S WRITINGS ARE ALWAYS THERE, BUT THE PLAY 2ND FIDDLE TO THE WONDER OF AMERICA'S NATURAL BEAUTY. Great effort: a must for any lover of native plants.

If you like Thoreau, but don't have a lot of spare time to spend at Walden, this is the Thoreau book for you. It is filled with inspiring little paragraphs. Open this book to any page for a quick observation of life in the great outdoors. Quotes are extracted from his overall works and are easily understood in context. Fun to read, and a great reminder of your favorite Thoreau sayings. Such as "If you want to be as healthy as an ox, eat what the ox eats, not the ox." etc.

So many thanks to A.K.B. Pillai for writing an eclectic gem of knowledge encompassing and correlating the history and junction points of Hinduism and Buddhism, and biographical information about one of my heros, Henry David Thoreau.

As soon as I saw he had used the word I thought I'd coined; "psycho-philosophy" I knew it was a book for me. The in-depth explorative journeying amongst the hidden aspects of Hindu, Buddhist and the American Transcendentalist beliefs and practices that unite them is refreshing for me. Professor Pillai had the concepts and first wrote the book in 1930! That makes him a great thinker, in 'my book!'

Heavily quoted from the Bhagavad Gita and Thoreau's Walden Pond, the cross-references are a playground for me. Born in India himself, Professor Pillai has the ability to explain the deeper meanings of the "Hindu" Philosophy, and since he's an Anthropologist his studies have been intensive, and it shows.

He writes; (p69) "Thoreau's conception of nature is evident in the following passage in Bhagavad Gita:
"Of things created--All are come forth--From the seeming union --of Field and Knower, Prakriti with Brahman."

He goes on, quoting Edgerton in his version of the Bhagavad Gita, p.144; "This attributes "to all nature not only 'mental' faculties, will, self-consciousness, and thinking organ, which are parts of material nature and its primary evolvements but also a soul that is distinct from material nature."

Dr. Pillai then continues, saying: "This soul in its universal existence is the Divine Soul. Hence every thing is a part of the Great One. In this sense Thoreau's affinity with nature has not only aesthetic importance, but also spiritual significance."

I'd never known that Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman were influenced by the Bhagavad Gita, and I'm glad I read this book. In a day that is so tenuous for our Earthly Resources, it brought the magnitude of Thoreau, the Bhagavad Gita, and Buddhism's Dhammapada closer and more real to me. I've got tons of references to follow up on.

This book is wondrous. For openers, it is written so well that it is a marvel of English usage and will shame most of us that think we know the language. Secondly, it strikes a marvelous balance between pedagogy - for fundamentally this is a serious scholastic work - and the delight that the author takes in his subject.

Dealing with Thoreau to great degree, it shows how punning was a significant part of romantic literature, and should not be dealt with contempt, but rather as a serious and significant part of our literary heritage.

Plus the humor in both the the subject matter and Professor West's treatment thereof are incomparable. Highly recommended to both the scholar and the interested dilletante atracted to our language and its associated history.