Thoreau beyond your hippie parents

Robert Sullivan has grabbed the third rail of environmentalism - he has written a book that challenges some of our deepest set notions of who Henry David Thoreau was and aims to recast Thoreau in a larger place than just a hermit and recluse and champion of environmentalism and civil disobedience. And, Sullivan generally succeeds at this.

The Thoreau You Don't Know paints a more complete portrait of the man that everyone has "known" for generations. Sullivan rounds out the character and fleshes him out into a real human being that was, besides what we know and love, a social critic, a humorist, a lover of music and good company.

Challenge yourself and what you think you know as gospel and dive into The Thoreau You Don't Know and you might be surprised what you learn, and what you are willing to embrace. ( )

This book is both social and intellectual history centered on Henry David Thoreau. It is written fairly well, there's just too much of it, it is more than I ever wanted to know about Thoreau.

Sullivan is at pains to describe the conventional wisdom on Thoreau and then to demolish it. The CW says that the man was an unsociable, humorless hermit. On the contrary, he was well-known in Concord, considered eccentric by some, but a fixture in the town. He used humor to get his points across more easily. He was not anti-technology, he did in fact design some machines and improve others. He was an abolitionist, and, though he wrote a precedent-setting essay on civil disobedience, he was never a pacifist and supported John Brown's raid despite its violence.

The author is also good at giving the context of the times. From our future-shocked era, the mid-nineteenth century may not seem like a time of great change, but it was. First of all was the overwhelming change in travel due to the railroads... a real game-changing event that made distances much smaller. Printing presses kept making technological advances that made printed material cheaper and more widely available.

In all of this, Thoreau spent most of his life studying the ecology of one town, Concord, Massachusetts. He made his study of this small ecology into a vast commentary on the topic of ecology, and for that he has an assured place in American intellectual history. ( )