Henry David Thoreau Audiobook By Laura Dassow Walls cover art

Henry David Thoreau

A Life

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Henry David Thoreau

By: Laura Dassow Walls
Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
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"Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854.

But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau's character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, "Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided."

Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls restores Henry David Thoreau to us in all his profound, inspiring complexity.

©2017 The University of Chicago (P)2017 Tantor

Accolades & Awards

Los Angeles Times Book Prize
2017
Literary History & Criticism Los Angeles Times Book Prize Philosophy Biographies & Memoirs Art & Literature Authors United States World Literature

Critic reviews

"The wonder is that, given her book's richness, Walls still leaves the reader eager to read Thoreau. Her scholarly blockbuster is an awesome achievement, a merger of comprehensiveness in content with pleasure in reading." ( Publishers Weekly, Starred Review)
Carefully Researched • Fascinating Biography • Skilled Reader • Complex Figure • Historical Context • Immersive Content

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The author must have spent untold hours on her research for this book. It is very good and thorough. And she presents the information in a superbly fascinating manner. It was not just a biography on Thoreau, it was a history of the United States back in that time. I highly recommend this selection.

If you like Thoreau, you will LOVE this book.

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loved that he applied to work at Perkins School for the blind also being a Harvard graduate and could fix and repair anything and write and the love of nature and animals

very smart with basic common sense

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It is probably hard to write a biography of Thoreau without it sounding like a hagiography as the man seemed to embody the best of being human. I found my eyes misting up as I read the final chapter. This biography is a fitting tribute to one of America’s greatest citizens.

A fitting tribute to a life well lived

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I loved this book. I am a huge fan of Mr. Thoreau's. I learned things I did not know. Laughed, was challenged, and inspired. Such an amazing, beautiful, and conflicted life.

Don't wait... Listen Now!!!

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I really enjoyed this biography. It is interesting that a female biographer’s book has a male narrator. Still it is wonderfully narrated. I love how Thoreau is fully placed in his times politically, religiously, artistically and ecologically. We also see Thoreau connection to the other writers from Concord. Well worth the listen,

Both biography and history of his 19th century

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