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Rating:  - ¡Excelente, Excellent!
This book was delivered in excellent conditions, it was a brand new book and it arrived faster than I expected!
Rating: - Book cover commercialization?
A previous reviewer asked what Thoreau might think of how society has developed commercially since he wrote this book. I have to also wonder what he would think of the ridiculous (in my opinion) and jingoistic cover of this current edition? The person who chose the cover design should have read the book. The cover is offensive, given the ideas the book contains. Penguin should be ashamed.
Rating: - Amazon Purchases August 9, 2007
This is a classic novel. It's value as literature speaks for itself.
I received the product in the condition advertised, in two days.
I am completely satisfied with the purchase and service.
Rating: - He heard a different drummer- The sun is but a morning star
Thoreau is more than simply a writer who produced a great American classic. He exemplified the idea which perhaps as much as any other has come to be at the heart of the American creed. "If a man does not keep pace to his companion, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
Throreau when he went into the woods of Walden Pond on July 4, 1845 , a journey in solitude which would last just two years and two months, was the archetypal American individualist. He was the man 'doing his own thing' living in accordance with what only he could know was right for himself. This idea of 'radical individualism' has become part of the American common faith. Its abuses are legion and may be disastrous, but it also has brought about not simply 'better mousetraps' but a whole vast world of innovations and innovators, the like of which Mankind has never known before.
Thoreau as he writes in his introduction went to the woods to explore not simply the natural world, the outdoors he so much loved. He went to the woods to truly go more deeply into and know himself. As he says in his introduction:
" I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me."
Thoreau in that enigmatic, epigrammatic aphoristic style, he shared with his great mentor and fellow pioneering poet- philosopher, Emerson connects the world within with the world without , connects the Concord woods with the Cosmos . He creates a work in 'Walden' of singular beauty and of its own special economy and principles in thought.
Thoreau was too an abolitionist, an opponent of the Mexican war, a civil disobedient who refused to pay the poll tax-, a pioneer
whose followers would include Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
But in his close looking at the world of nature and the world of himself he was first a great explorer of life and reality going out alone in his own way- however geographically close he may have been to home.
His words and his wisdom waken us even today to the hope of new and better worlds i.e. he also embodied the spirit of a great American optimism.
The great individual teaches us even in dark hours to find new worlds in ourselves outside our own darknesses. " There are new worlds yet to be born" he writes, " The sun is but a morning star"
Rating:  - Awful introduction
Walden itself is a book that will make you re-examine every aspect of your life. I recommend buying another version. The writer of the introduction to this version is clearly not a fan of Thoreau. He certainly did not experience the spiritual somersault that 80% of the population would experience with this masterpiece, and so is ill-suited to comment on it. The quotations from other authors at the end of the book seem to have been chosen to undermine Thoreau, and the review questions are at best patronizing and at worst insulting.
In addition the type and pages are too small. You will want a larger volume with room for underlining and note-taking when you read this Walden.
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