Word: thoreau
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...globe, 26-year-old Dallas resident DotComGuy (known as Mitch Maddox before he changed his name) has turned himself into a sort of wired groundhog, vowing to spend an entire year ordering everything he needs to live, from food to furniture, over the Internet. Like a switched-on Thoreau at a virtual Walden Pond, he devised the stunt to teach mankind that the age of e-commerce is here--and that it is good...
That he only partly succeeded is one of the many charms of Wild Fruits (Norton; 409 pages; $29.95), which finally sees print thanks to the heroic editing efforts of Thoreau scholar Bradley Dean. Thoreau left the Wild Fruits manuscript neatly stacked and wrapped at the time of his death, but much jumbling and shuffling occurred as the papers passed from owner to owner. That confusion, plus Thoreau's notoriously hen-scratched handwriting, kept Wild Fruits a closed book until now. Readers will find that its preserved contents have aged...
...sense, the freshness of Thoreau's long-undeciphered writings should surprise no one. He, along with Mark Twain, essentially invented the plain but supple American prose style, carefully composed to sound casual. So, to stress the point that "high blueberries" must be looked for in swamps, Thoreau writes, "When I see their dense curving tops ahead, I expect a wet foot." He dresses his adages in homespun: "All kinds of harvestry, even pulling turnips when the first cold weather numbs your fingers, are interesting if you have been the sower and have not sowed too many...
...Thoreau orders Wild Fruits as a botanist might, collecting his notes on each plant in the order in which it blooms. He records the dates of his sightings and the measurements he has made: "September 24, 1859. The common shrub oak is apparently the most fertile of our oaks. I count two hundred sixty-six acorns on a branch just two feet long." But he has trouble keeping poetry out of his descriptions: "August 23, 1858. Abundantly shedding its downy seeds, wands of white and pink." And sometimes the objective mask slips completely: "July 30, 1860. Beautiful...
...tension between Thoreau the naturalist and Thoreau the missionary for nature's wonders invigorates nearly every page of Wild Fruits. He portrays his subjects with keen clarity, but he also wants his Concord neighbors to wake up to the error of their ways: "We cultivate imported shrubs in our front yards for the beauty of their berries, while at least equally beautiful berries grow unregarded by us in the surrounding fields." He argues passionately against the careless destruction of the wilderness around him. Hearing that huckleberry pickers in his area have been ordered off privately owned fields, he fumes, "What...