Seeing New Worlds

Seeing New Worlds PDF Author: Laura Dassow Walls
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299147436
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Thoreau was a poet, a naturalist, a major American writer. Was he also a scientist? He was, Laura Dassow Walls suggests. Her book, the first to consider Thoreau as a serious and committed scientist, will change the way we understand his accomplishment and the place of science in American culture. Walls reveals that the scientific texts of Thoreau’s day deeply influenced his best work, from Walden to the Journal to the late natural history essays. Here we see how, just when literature and science were splitting into the “two cultures” we know now, Thoreau attempted to heal the growing rift. Walls shows how his commitment to Alexander von Humboldt’s scientific approach resulted in not only his “marriage” of poetry and science but also his distinctively patterned nature studies. In the first critical study of his “The Dispersion of Seeds” since its publication in 1993, she exposes evidence that Thoreau was using Darwinian modes of reasoning years before the appearance of Origin of Species. This book offers a powerful argument against the critical tradition that opposes a dry, mechanistic science to a warm, “organic” Romanticism. Instead, Thoreau’s experience reveals the complex interaction between Romanticism and the dynamic, law-seeking science of its day. Drawing on recent work in the theory and philosophy of science as well as literary history and theory, Seeing New Worlds bridges today’s “two cultures” in hopes of stimulating a fuller consideration of representations of nature.

Seeing New Worlds

Seeing New Worlds PDF Author: Laura Dassow Walls
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299147436
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Get Book Here

Book Description
Thoreau was a poet, a naturalist, a major American writer. Was he also a scientist? He was, Laura Dassow Walls suggests. Her book, the first to consider Thoreau as a serious and committed scientist, will change the way we understand his accomplishment and the place of science in American culture. Walls reveals that the scientific texts of Thoreau’s day deeply influenced his best work, from Walden to the Journal to the late natural history essays. Here we see how, just when literature and science were splitting into the “two cultures” we know now, Thoreau attempted to heal the growing rift. Walls shows how his commitment to Alexander von Humboldt’s scientific approach resulted in not only his “marriage” of poetry and science but also his distinctively patterned nature studies. In the first critical study of his “The Dispersion of Seeds” since its publication in 1993, she exposes evidence that Thoreau was using Darwinian modes of reasoning years before the appearance of Origin of Species. This book offers a powerful argument against the critical tradition that opposes a dry, mechanistic science to a warm, “organic” Romanticism. Instead, Thoreau’s experience reveals the complex interaction between Romanticism and the dynamic, law-seeking science of its day. Drawing on recent work in the theory and philosophy of science as well as literary history and theory, Seeing New Worlds bridges today’s “two cultures” in hopes of stimulating a fuller consideration of representations of nature.

New Approaches to Thoreau

New Approaches to Thoreau PDF Author: William Bysshe Stein
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description


Sensible Cruising

Sensible Cruising PDF Author: Don Casey
Publisher: International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press
ISBN: 9780071580250
Category : Sailing
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
If wisdom can be defined as common sense that has withstood the test of time, then Sensible Cruising is a wise book. It explains: Why a sensible cruise is affordable to almost anyone. Why the boat of choice for most cruisers is under 35 feet. Why lowering the cost doesn't devalue the cruise. How simplicity minimizes insulation from the experience. How to think in terms of how little, not how much, is really required. Drawing heavily on the philosophy of the sage of Walden Pond, this book is a gentle guide to the art of commonsense cruising which, in hardcover, was one of the 10 best-selling sailing books of all time. Now available for the first time in paperback, Sensible Cruising, a former main selection of the Dolphin Book Club, is more pertinent than ever during this time of economic retrenchment. No truer American existed than Thoreau . . . there was an excellent wisdom in him, proper to a rare class of men . . . [with] power of description and literary excellence . . . he chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself . . . --Ralph Waldo Emerson I never would have imagined that Thoreau's philosophy could be so aptly applied to anything as disparate as cruising.--Dr. Walter Harding, author and Secretary of the Thoreau Society At sea, I learned how little a person needs, not how much.--Robin Lee Graham, Circumnavigator and author of DoveOne of the wonderful things about the cruising life is that it teaches you how little you can get along on, that to lead a fulfilling life it is not necessary to have a big pile of bucks. This may have been self-evident to Thoreau before the day of mass media, but in our modern environment it isa philosophy that is difficult to come by. Your readers should be aware that being judicious in their purchases can be financially rewarding at the end. We have always treated our boats as investments, and made money, on all of them.--Steve Dashew, Circumnavigator, and author of Bluewater Handbook and The Circumnavigator's HandbookIt does look sometimes as if the world were on its last legs. How many there are whose principal employment is is nowadays to eat their meals and go to the post-office.--Henry David Thoreau What others say about this book: This is one of the most intriguing and original books on cruising to appear in a long time . . . an admirably practical guide . . . with a delightful sense of humor . . . --John Rousmaniere, author of The Annapolis Book of Seamanship, The Sailing Lifestyle, Fastnet Force 10, and The Golden Pastime: A New History of YachtingFor anyone contemplating a prolonged sail . . . this book makes an excellent companion, full of sensible advice on the fine art of making-do when things don't go quite as expected.--SoundingsSensible Cruising is a refreshing change, written for those of us who dream of modest goals. Every cruising sailor, ambitious or unambitious, should read and treasure this memorable volume.--SailingCasey and Hackler suck the very marrow of life from Henry David Thoreau's writings to build a case for the small cruiser. The perfect instigation to get procrastinators and naysayers off the pot and over the horizon.--Dan Spurr, Senior Editor, Cruising World, and author of Spurr's Boatbook: Upgrading the Cruising Sailboat

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau PDF Author: Laura Dassow Walls
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022634469X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 668

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Book Description
"[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."--

Walden

Walden PDF Author: Henry David Thoreau
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description


Thoreau at Devil's Perch

Thoreau at Devil's Perch PDF Author: B. B. Oak
Publisher: Kensington Books
ISBN: 0758290233
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Henry David Thoreau leaves the seclusion of Walden Pond to help investigate a series of murder in the first in B.B. Oak's fascinating historical mystery series, set against the bucolic backdrop of 19th century New England.

Thoreau's Living Ethics

Thoreau's Living Ethics PDF Author: Philip Cafaro
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820336661
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
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.

Walden's Shore

Walden's Shore PDF Author: Robert M. Thorson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674728408
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Walden's Shore explores Thoreau's understanding of the "living rock" on which life's complexity depends--not as metaphor but as physical science. Robert Thorson's subject is Thoreau the rock and mineral collector, interpreter of landscapes, and field scientist whose compass and measuring stick were as important to him as his plant press.

This Radical Land

This Radical Land PDF Author: Daegan Miller
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022633631X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
“The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That’s largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today: a country expanding unstoppably, bending the continent’s natural bounty to the national will, heedless of consequence. A country of slavery and of Indian wars. There’s much truth in that vision. But if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one that’s been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story. Daegan Miller is our guide on a beautifully written, revelatory trip across the continent during which we encounter radical thinkers, settlers, and artists who grounded their ideas of freedom, justice, and progress in the very landscapes around them, even as the runaway engine of capitalism sought to steamroll everything in its path. Here we meet Thoreau, the expert surveyor, drawing anticapitalist property maps. We visit a black antislavery community in the Adirondack wilderness of upstate New York. We discover how seemingly commercial photographs of the transcontinental railroad secretly sent subversive messages, and how a band of utopian anarchists among California’s sequoias imagined a greener, freer future. At every turn, everyday radicals looked to landscape for the language of their dissent—drawing crucial early links between the environment and social justice, links we’re still struggling to strengthen today. Working in a tradition that stretches from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit, Miller offers nothing less than a new way of seeing the American past—and of understanding what it can offer us for the present . . . and the future.

Thoreau Beyond Borders

Thoreau Beyond Borders PDF Author: François Specq
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781625345554
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Henry David Thoreau spent his life as an intellectual vagrant, jumping fences, pushing boundaries, and crossing borders. How, why, and to what end are the questions asked by contributors to this new volume of essays, whose work crosses national and disciplinary borders to think about Thoreau anew. Deliberately invoking Thoreau's commitment to "living a border life," a life located between the world of nature and that of the polis, these varied essays explore the writer's thinking and writing as situated not merely against, but across and beyond borders and boundaries -- whether geographic, temporal, or spiritual. Arguing that literary texts are governed by mediation and dialogue, lines of force becoming lines of connection that entail complex patterns and interweavings, the contributors draw on methodologies that freely combine literary and philosophical approaches with cultural and political ones -- in turn moving us beyond borders. Contributors include the volume editors as well as Kristen Case, Danielle Follett, Rochelle Johnson, John J. Kucich, Daniel S. Malachuk, Henrik Otterberg, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Benjamin Pickford, David M. Robinson, Christa Holm Vogelius, and Michael C. Weisenburg.