The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond [Kindle Edition] Author: Michael Sims | Language: English | ISBN:
B00GC53AFO | Format: PDF, EPUB
The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond Free Download
Download electronic versions of selected books The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond Free Download for everyone book mediafire, rapishare, and mirror link Henry David Thoreau has long been an intellectual icon and folk hero. In this strikingly original profile, Michael Sims reveals how the bookish, quirky young man who kept quitting jobs evolved into the patron saint of environmentalism and nonviolent activism.
Working from nineteenth-century letters and diaries by Thoreau’s family, friends, and students, Sims charts Henry’s course from his time at Harvard through the years he spent living in a cabin beside Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.
Sims uncovers a previously hidden Thoreau—the rowdy boy reminiscent of Tom Sawyer, the sarcastic college iconoclast, the devoted son who kept imitating his beloved older brother’s choices in life. Thoreau was deeply influenced by his parents—his father owned a pencil factory in Concord, his mother was an abolitionist and social activist—and by Ralph Waldo Emerson, his frequent mentor. Sims relates intimate, telling moments in Thoreau’s daily life—in Emerson’s library; teaching his neighbor and friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to row a boat; exploring the natural world and Native American culture; tutoring Emerson’s nephew on Staten Island and walking the streets of New York in the hope of launching a writing career.
Returned from New York, Thoreau approached Emerson to ask if he could build a cabin on his mentor’s land on the shores of Walden Pond, anticipating the isolation would galvanize his thoughts and actions. That it did. While at the cabin, he wrote his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and refined the journal entries that formed the core of Walden. Resisting what he felt were unfair taxes, he spent the night in jail that led to his celebrated essay “Civil Disobedience,” which would inspire the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Chronicling Thoreau’s youthful transformation, Sims reveals how this decade would resonate over the rest of his life, and thereafter throughout American literature and history. Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond [Kindle Edition] Free Download
- File Size: 947 KB
- Print Length: 385 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1620401959
- Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; 1 edition (February 18, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00GC53AFO
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #55,929 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
From this refreshing re-examination of a national icon, we learn that Henry David Thoreau was a non-conformist, a bit "on the spectrum" as we might deduce through today's lens, but not quite the utter hermit some have supposed him to be. The cabin at Walden Pond was arrived at by logical steps, and was neither the beginning nor the end of a short but memorable life. Author Michael Sims describes Thoreau's youthful progression in vivid, emotionally evocative language.
Thoreau was a child obsessed with science and nature. Surrounded by trees and streams, his people were not farmers. His mother was an early, self-styled abolitionist, and his father was a pencil manufacturer. They were remarkably tolerant of their son's quirks; Thoreau was a demandingly curious, rough cut, woods wanderer who managed to scrape into Harvard on the bottom rung. These days, his trajectory would be considered pretty typical: a rebel without a cause for much of his youth, he dropped out of his first profession --- teaching --- because he did not believe in corporal punishment, at that time considered necessary to learning.
A born naturalist, Thoreau roved the local landscape, seemingly measuring each plot for possible occupation. He once scandalized the region on one of his romps, by starting a fire that went out of control and burned a wide swath, calling forth the fire brigade and understandably inciting local wrath. Though he pretended to ignore the general outrage, Sims records that" he felt an inconsolable grief over the loss of the woods." He also suffered a deep personal loss when his more sociable older brother, John, whom he idolized, died of tetanus: "Henry was holding John in his arms when he gasped his last choking breath.
... with the help of terrific insights, like the ones Michael Sims offers us here. There's nothing like a new Thoreau biography to re-introduce our favorite author-naturalist to another population. And veteran Thoreauvians are entertained as well, because it gives them new material to chew on and to debate.
Yes, quite a few Thoreau biographies already exist. In the beginning they were written by Henry's friends, as a way of honoring and remembering him. Then a few fans at the turn of the last century (and on both sides of the Atlantic) took on the task of adding to and refining the information, because they could still ask crucial questions of those few remaining people of Concord who had once known Henry. During the WWII years, the literary scholars joined the crowd; and they set the standard for many decades. Today we hear a diversity of voices, from a variety of sources -- many of them, from those folks who encountered Thoreau in high school or in college in the 1960s-1970s-1980s. Like Michael Sims. (Like me.)
We all have our own personal versions of Henry. For Sims, he's forever young and vital. The focus here is on the first 30 years of Henry's life: up until the time that he leaves Walden Pond in 1847. He paints the picture of a highly sensitive man who is curious about the behaviors of both Nature and mankind. Someone who wants to be at least a little successful at being a writer, but who encounters difficulties in getting published. Included are naturally the usual stories and the near-myths of Henry's life -- abruptly resigning after teaching only two weeks at a public school; becoming devastated by his brother John's death; accidentally setting the woods on fire; moving to Walden Pond; spending a night in jail for non-payment of the poll tax, etc. etc.
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