{"id":45253,"date":"2024-06-18T08:51:16","date_gmt":"2024-06-18T08:51:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elgonstore.com\/?post_type=product&p=45253"},"modified":"2024-06-18T08:51:16","modified_gmt":"2024-06-18T08:51:16","slug":"a-week-on-the-concord-and-merrimack-rivers","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/elgonstore.com\/index.php\/product\/a-week-on-the-concord-and-merrimack-rivers\/","title":{"rendered":"A week on the concord and merrimack rivers"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers<\/span>\u00a0is based on a boat trip Thoreau took with his brother in 1839 from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire. Ten years in the writing (it was the book he retired to Walden to work on) and incorporating essays, passages from his journal, and some of his best poems, it is a superbly crafted achievement, its texture enriched by the idealism of the Transcendentalists, the delighted wordplay of an imaginative linguist, the individualism of a young America, and the earthiness of a lover of nature.<\/p>\n

Walden<\/span>\u00a0is a personal declaration of independence, a social experiment, and a voyage of spiritual discovery, set within the seasonal cycle of a year\u2019s \u201cLife in the Woods.\u201d \u201cSimplify, simplify\u201d is the beat of its \u201cmore distant drummer\u201d\u2014to abandon waste and illusion, to get to the bottom of life\u2019s essential needs, and to practice a new economy for humane living. Its witty and pointed rhetoric brings together language and nature, the human and nonhuman in unusual conjunctions that resonate with symbolic meanings. A manual of self-reliance as well as a masterpiece of style, it is one of the most fervently loved classics of American literature.<\/p>\n

The Maine Woods<\/span>\u00a0is an account of three trips taken by boat and canoe in 1846, 1853, and 1857 through an unexplored interior bypassed by westward expansion. It describes the virgin rivers and forests of Maine, the customs of woodsmen and Indian guides, the hunting of moose, and the effects of the timber industry and encroaching settlement. An early and eloquent plea for conservation by a farsighted naturalist, its close observation of the American wild becomes an examination of \u201cthe motives which carry men into the wilderness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cape Cod<\/span>\u00a0is the bleakest of Thoreau\u2019s works, resembling Melville\u2019s prose in its vision of the titanic indifference of nature. Cape Cod appears as both ocean and desert, a vast expanse of shipwrecks and barren soil, peopled by hardy, weathered inhabitants who seem survivors from the age of the first Pilgrims. Based upon his own visits and upon accounts from the earliest times, it is an unsentimental study of human endurance in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"