Walden

Walden PDF

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Publisher:

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13:

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On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: This is Thoreau's classic protest against government's interference with individual liberty. One of the most famous essays ever written, it came to the attention of Gandhi and formed the basis for his passive resistance movement.

Walden Warming

Walden Warming PDF

Author: Richard B. Primack

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2014-04-01

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 022606221X

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“An unnervingly close-to-home perspective [on] the dynamics and impact of climate change on plants, birds, and myriad other species, including us.”—Booklist In his meticulous notes on the natural history of Concord, Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau records the first open flowers of highbush blueberry on May 11, 1853. If he were to look for the first blueberry flowers in Concord today, mid-May would be too late. Warming temperatures have pushed blueberry flowering three weeks earlier, and in 2012, following a period of record-breaking warmth, blueberries began flowering on April 1—six weeks earlier than in Thoreau’s time. In Walden Warming, Richard B. Primack uses Thoreau and Walden, icons of the conservation movement, to track the effects of a warming climate on Concord’s plants and animals, with the notes that Thoreau made years ago transformed from charming observations into scientific data sets. Primack finds that many wildflower species that Thoreau observed, including familiar groups such as irises, asters, and lilies, have declined in abundance or disappeared from Concord. Primack also describes how warming temperatures have altered other aspects of Thoreau’s Concord, from the dates when ice departs from Walden Pond in late winter, to the arrival of birds in the spring, to the populations of fish, salamanders, and butterflies that live in the woodlands, river meadows, and ponds. Demonstrating the effects of climate change in a unique, concrete way using this historical and literary landmark as a touchstone, Richard Primack urges us to heed the advice Thoreau offers in Walden: to live simply and wisely. In the process, we can minimize our own contributions to our warming climate.

Walden and Other Writings

Walden and Other Writings PDF

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Publisher: Modern Library

Published: 2000-11-01

Total Pages: 799

ISBN-13: 0679642021

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Henry David Thoreau's vision of personal freedom is indelibly etched on the American consciousness. 'We need the tonic of wildness,' Thoreau wrote in Walden, and by turning his back on town amenities to build a house on Walden Pond in 1845, he helped shape our notions of the individual, subsistence, and a moral relation to nature. Raising white beans and potatoes that he sold to his Concord neighbors, he stayed for two years; his book records both the philosophy he developed while living alone and the facts of his everyday life. Included here with the complete text of Walden are selections from Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; 'A Plea for Captain John Brown,' his eloquent defense of the American abolitionist's rebellion at Harper's Ferry, and such masterpieces as his famous essay 'Civil Disobedience,' in which he describes a night spent in prison for refusing to pay a poll tax to a government that condoned slavery.

Walden

Walden PDF

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-03-22

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 1400880793

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One of the most influential and compelling books in American literature, Walden is a vivid account of the years that Henry D. Thoreau spent alone in a secluded cabin at Walden Pond. This edition--introduced by noted American writer John Updike--celebrates the perennial importance of a classic work, originally published in 1854. Much of Walden's material is derived from Thoreau's journals and contains such engaging pieces from the lively "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" and "Brute Neighbors" to the serene "Reading" and "The Pond in the Winter." Other famous sections involve Thoreau's visits with a Canadian woodcutter and with an Irish family, a trip to Concord, and a description of his bean field. This is the complete and authoritative text of Walden--as close to Thoreau's original intention as all available evidence allows. This is the authoritative text of Walden and the ideal presentation of Thoreau's great document of social criticism and dissent.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau PDF

Author: Laura Dassow Walls

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2017-07-07

Total Pages: 668

ISBN-13: 022634469X

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"[The author] traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and 'America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.' By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated? Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, [the author] presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him."--

The Maine Woods

The Maine Woods PDF

Author: Henry David Thoreau

Publisher: Lulu.com

Published: 2018-07-12

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1387942824

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Over a period of three years, Henry David Thoreau made three trips to the largely unexplored woods of Maine. He scaled peaks, paddled a canoe, and dined on hemlock tea and moose lips. Taking notes, he acutely observed the rich flora and fauna, as well as the few people he met dotting the landscape, like lumberers, boat-men, and the Abnaki Indians. The Maine Woods is an American classic, a voyage into nature and the heart of early America.

Thoreau's Living Ethics

Thoreau's Living Ethics PDF

Author: Philip Cafaro

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010-01-25

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0820336661

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Thoreau's Living Ethics is the first full, rigorous account of Henry Thoreau's ethical philosophy. Focused on Walden but ranging widely across his writings, the study situates Thoreau within a long tradition of ethical thinking in the West, from the ancients to the Romantics and on to the present day. Philip Cafaro shows Thoreau grappling with important ethical questions that agitated his own society and discusses his value for those seeking to understand contemporary ethical issues. Cafaro's particular interest is in Thoreau's treatment of virtue ethics: the branch of ethics centered on personal and social flourishing. Ranging across the central elements of Thoreau's philosophy—life, virtue, economy, solitude and society, nature, and politics—Cafaro shows Thoreau developing a comprehensive virtue ethics, less based in ancient philosophy than many recent efforts and more grounded in modern life and experience. He presents Thoreau's evolutionary, experimental ethics as superior to the more static foundational efforts of current virtue ethicists. Another main focus is Thoreau's environmental ethics. The book shows Thoreau not only anticipating recent arguments for wild nature's intrinsic value, but also demonstrating how a personal connection to nature furthers self-development, moral character, knowledge, and creativity. Thoreau's life and writings, argues Cafaro, present a positive, life-affirming environmental ethics, combining respect and restraint with an appreciation for human possibilities for flourishing within nature.