...this superb new book could not have come at a better time ... Laura Dassow Walls’s exuberant biography leaves the reader in no doubt how Thoreau might react to the current administration in Washington, filled as it is with people who deny the established physical science of global warming ... One of the many pleasures of Walls’s book is how it transports us back to America in the first half of the 19th century.
This new biography is the masterpiece that the gadfly of youthful America deserves ... her broad grasp of the era’s scientific issues integrates Thoreau’s dawning ecological conscience into a better-understood context than most writers on the topic can provide ... Walls is too well versed in Thoreau’s life to accept his own often contradictory pronouncements or his semi-fictional first-person narrator as necessarily factual. She teases out nuances and implications, but without unfounded speculation.
In her richly rewarding Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Laura Dassow Walls rescues Thoreau from the caricatures that have adhered to him since his most famous work was published ... Ms. Walls convincingly shows that Thoreau’s journals are his second great masterpiece. Here Thoreau finally overcame the influence of Emerson to become a meticulous observer of natural phenomena ... If the Thoreau beyond Walden is an author for our time, then Laura Dassow Walls is his biographer.
[Walls] has written an engaging, sympathetic, and subtly learned biography that makes a strong case for Thoreau’s importance; she also seems a little baffled that anyone could fail to admire him ... Thoreau’s political engagement isn’t exactly news, but Walls foregrounds it vividly to show him as part of a set of engaged communities: radical Concord, the Transcendentalist network, the abolitionist movement, and his own militant family ... part of the power of Walls’s book is how she traces these liberal and humane preoccupations to the radicalism of his family and of Concord’s intellectual life ... But Walls sidesteps the reasons that people have bristled at Thoreau, including those who knew him in person. She takes for granted his genius and likability; his critics, she suggests, just failed to understand him. This defense comes at some intellectual cost: By downplaying the ways that Thoreau was and is alienating, she misses the chance to consider how his appeal and his unpleasantness might be linked.
Walls quickly dispels the incomplete caricature that has come down to us over time. By blending warm regard for her subject with intensive scholarship, she reintroduces us to a fully dimensional Thoreau ... In this biography overall, Walls has wrangled a vast amount of material, a cast of strong characters, and an era of dramatic flux to establish a flowing and highly enjoyable narrative. Time and again she produces the judicious quotation, the discerning observation, or the apt detail. Not only does the biographer capture the breadth and depth of Thoreau’s relations and work, she leaves us tantalized, wanting more.
...[an] ample, comprehensive, wholly sympathetic biography ... Although in recent years the major testament to Thoreau’s life as a writer has been the Journal, it is Walden that will keep him alive in the minds of most readers. Walls’s pages on that book employ precise and expressive language to bring out the sound of Thoreau’s voice — 'bold, lyric, yearning, prophetic, confrontational.' She also reminds us humorously that Thoreau is 'up on a soapbox,' concerned to make himself unmistakably heard ... Walls’s book abounds in memorable portraits of Thoreau in relation to his American literary contemporaries.
Pleasing to me was to see Cape Cod — Thoreau’s tome about that beguiling, bewitching peninsula, a briny world unto itself — get the plaudits it deserves. Walls rightly calls it 'Walden’s dark twin' ... This is Thoreau’s best writing, his most sonorously poetic, a mellifluous foghorn sounding for you, and your attention, in the deepest lapis lazuli of the night. As Walls writes, Thoreau relished visceral joy — the dance of nature, the reverberation of unadulterated, uncapped feeling — 'making this book of darkness blaze with life.' The same phrase could double as an encapsulation for his life, and now this biography, a rectangle of radiance in your hands, with its own glow.
Walls 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.
...[a] superb new biography ... Walls lets her sharpest observations slip through to the reader’s consciousness without touching the sides. The observations and interpretations are not hammered home, yet they are persuasive. She gives us a Thoreau who is more interesting, more intellectually curious and more subtle than I (for one) had given him credit for ... Wall’s biography allows Thoreau to breathe his own air on her pages, while turning her critical gaze on each of the public roles he played as political activist, mystic, tax refuser and environmentalist. In the end, they all come together in Thoreau the writer – the person who said: 'A man writing is the scribe of all nature – he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing.'”
In lieu of a definitive account of America’s most enigmatic man of letters, Walls offers 'a reading of Thoreau’s life as a writer – for, remarkably, he made of his life an extended form of composition, a kind of open, living book.' A noble aim, to be sure, though Thoreau’s writing life can’t neatly be separated from the many other lives he led. Some of Walls’s most vivid insights, in fact, concern Thoreau’s interest in science of all kinds, including mechanical engineering ... Walls portrays Thoreau as perhaps warmer than he really was, downplaying the considerable evidence of what a cold fish he could be. But for those of us who first endured Walden as assigned reading, the sheer pleasure that Walls takes in Thoreau’s writings is a timely reminder, on the bicentennial of his birth, that he’s an author not simply to be respected, but enjoyed.
In her luminous new biography of Thoreau, Laura Dassow Walls corrects many popular notions about the great American naturalist ... Reading Walls, I realise now just how deeply Thoreau carved his words into my character, or at least the character to which I aspired ... Through Walls’ biography, he once more challenges us to see, with his passion and intensity, the world in all its cruelty and its splendour, riddled with human lies and abundant in natural truths.
A superbly researched and written literary portrait that broadens our understanding of the great American writer and pre-eminent naturalist who has too long been regarded as a self-righteous scold ... Thoreau has inspired so many esteemed biographies that it's difficult to claim any new one as definitive. However, Walls delivers a sympathetic and honest portrait that fully captures the private and public life of this singular American figure.
In this definitive biography, the many facets of Thoreau are captured with grace and scholarly rigor ... 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.
