Elevating Ourselves: Thoreau on Mountains

"On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning," Thoreau wrote. J. Parker Huber is along for the climb, comparing what Thoreau say in his era to what we can see today.

"On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning," Thoreau wrote. J. Parker Huber is along for the climb, comparing what Thoreau say in his era to what we can see today.

Library Journal

Sponsored by the Thoreau Society, this trio of conveniently pocket-sized volumes, each with a fresh and authoritative foreword, makes an ideal introduction to the Transcendental naturalist of Concord. The selections in each go beyond predictable snippets from Walden, encompassing nuggets mined from both the familiar and remotest reaches of Thoreau's journals--all a joy to read and ponder. Among the three topics, readers may be best acquainted with Harvard graduate Thoreau's far-sighted views on real education as an unending, hands-on pursuit--here illuminated by his views on science and mountains. Long thought, after his death, to be merely a scrupulous collector of facts and measurements, Thoreau was in fact a self-proclaimed mystic who worried that his increasingly frequent brushes with scientific objectivity were threatening his commitment to a life of poetry and principle. These three slim volumes are highly recommended for all nonacademic libraries.--Charles Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live," Henry David Thoreau once observed. The American poet, essayist and philosopher certainly held himself to that standard -- living out the tenets of Transcendentalism, recounting the experience in his masterpiece, Walden (1854), and passionately advocating human rights and civil liberties in the famous essay, Civil Disobedience (1849).