RaveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... one of the things that immediately struck me about Solid Seasons is the patient mastery of an enormous body of work. Even in our era of digital Ctrl-F searching and algorithmic surface reading, the depth and breadth of Cramer’s research is astounding ... It’s as if his extensive footnotes aren’t enough — he gives the audience his unmediated archive. This makes for slow, repetitive reading ... But, as I came to appreciate, such slowness and repetition is the book’s point, its strength; and what subtle motion there is comes from Cramer’s patient layering of sources one atop the other. It’s tidal, and like water running downhill, the book slowly sifts and sorts and reshapes how we understand each man ... When I finally finished Solid Seasons, when I closed its cover and laid it on my floor, I felt a remarkable presence, even though I was alone. It’s an idiosyncratic book, a minimalist history, Thoreauvian in its desire to be just as it is, generous in the way it bares itself, full of trust that readers are smart enough to spin conclusions for themselves, and intense in its demand that they elevate themselves to the task.
Laura Dassow Walls
RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksWalls does this throughout the book: turning to the historical record to dispel caricature and uncover the human truth ... But correcting the historical record, important as that may be, is only a small part of what Walls is up to. At the core of her book is the stunningly perceptive, deceptively simple insight that '[Thoreau’s] social activism and his defense of nature sprang from the same roots: he found society in nature, and nature he found everywhere, including the town center and the human heart' ... With Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Walls puts the philosopher of wilderness to rest and reanimates a revolutionary Thoreau who remains defiantly in opposition to many of modernity’s gravest ills.
