I am not a fan of Thoreau, but I appreciated learning about how his life and legacy inspired others (mainly environmentalists and artists) who took his message and expounded on it.

This was a heavier read than I expected, and I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. Unfortunately, it felt like slogging through mud after a while and the reading exhausted me. I can say that I did learn something that was new to me. I hadn't known that Thoreau died so young. I suppose any book that teaches us something isn't all bad.
I appreciate the chance to review this book and thank the publisher and NetGalley for a chance to read and review it.

Henry David Thoreau was a plethoric and creative writer whose love for the natural environment, born of his meticulous observations of the natural world, as well as his political stance in serious issues such as the end of slavery in the U.S., inspired and influenced a great number of future literary writers, politicians, philosophers, political theorists, even social resistance movements (mainly due to his legendary book, titled ''Civil Disobedience''). In this notable study by Andrew Menard, the author attempts to shift some of the focus from the mainstream interpretation of Thoreau's work who is introduced as an emblematic modern thinker, a totally different image from the secluded hermit that we are used to. H.D. Thoreau is a thinker who has a lot more to teach us and this is exactly what A. Menard tries to pinpoint. This is not a book about Thoreau, but rather we are learning from Thoreau's spiritual richness and wisdom. According to Menard, Thoreau is an original thinker and founder of the modern environmentalism and throughout the book, the author places Thoreau in juxtaposition with a number of today's artists and thinkers and he succeeds in holding Thoreau's thinking up-to-date. This book is recommended to all, academic scholars or not, interested in Thoreau and modern-day philosophy and literature.

Learning from Thoreau by Andrew Menard is described by the publisher as "an intimate intellectual walk with America's most edgy and original environmentalist." Our students read and study Thoreau's writing (as well as that of his contemporaries like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne) and I was hoping to find a text which could enhance those units. "Edgy" and "environmentalist" seemed to have some teen appeal, but I found this new text from the University of Georgia Press to have more emphasis on the "intellectual" aspect. As a result, I do believe it will appeal to scholars (and they have given it some positive reviews) much more so than our students.

This is a slightly different look at Thoreau - a glance through the spectrum - but it only increases the importance of his legacy. The patterns in nature that he discovered through many years of observation hold true today, and gave the world more clarity into the natural world. It is easy to forget just how important were the lessons of the mid-nineteenth century. Darwin's On the Origins of Species was not published until 1859 as was his Journal of Researches. Walden; or Life in the Woods was published in 1854 but Thoreau was an avid enthusiast of Charles Darwin and read thoroughly The Voyage of the Beagle published in 1839.

Other contemporaries of that period of rapid growth of knowledge and exploration were Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Bartram, Bronson Alcott, John Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Roderick Nash - all had influence on or received influence from Thoreau, in both naturalism and civil disobedience. Thoreau died in 1862 at the age of 44, from tuberculosis he contracted in 1936. Think what an influence he might have had on our world had he lived a normal life span! He would have been either eulogized or jailed....

This is a book I feel blessed to have read, and I can happily recommend it to friends and family, young and old. I received a free electronic copy of this biography from Netgalley, Andrew Menard, and University of Georgia Press in exchange for an honest review.