Word: thoreau
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...special whipping boys are writers. He claims that not one American writer "with any class" has grappled seriously with technology or offered anything more constructive than a "scream of horror" at industrialization. There's enough truth in that; it's found in a string of American writers from Thoreau to Henry Miller who wouldn't object to being labelled "Natural Luddites...
...hunting, the dizzying zest of mountain climbing. But it grants something else: a philosophy - an acceptance and ultimately a grudging admiration for unyielding nature. It is that philosophy that lured such beleaguered politicians as Franklin Roosevelt, Hoover, Eisenhower and Kennedy. It is that philosophy that prompted Henry David Thoreau to describe time itself as "the stream I go a-fishing...
...hands on the dust jacket, who looks out of her cottage window on nature and, sure enough, starting right on schedule with January, records the seasons as they come and go at Tinker Creek in Virginia. After the obligatory prologue resolving to "cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity," pace Thoreau, she introduces her obligatory cat and a goldfish named Ellery Channing. Then onto your feet. In "the long slant of light that means good walking," she points out the sights: the creek, 17 ft. wide; a favorite Osage orange tree; a sycamore log bridge; a tiny grassy island; a quarry...
Things certainly have changed. As someone said, if armored cars had rolled into Harvard Square five years ago it would have been for a different reason. Now that the spirit of Wayne has replaced the spirit of Thoreau at Harvard, now that the "disturbances" of the Sixties are finally over, now that, as the Globe says, "the silly season has returned to Harvard," whatever force it is in America that wages wars of extermination may rouse itself again and prepare to engage, without fear of its conscience on the campuses, since that conscience is safely asleep. Mel Konner, Ph.D...
...done, and usefully, but not in a 400-page book. Among the subjects not mentioned are the Spanish-American War, the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, the building of the Erie Canal, the suffragettes, baseball, universal secondary education and the establishment of the land-grant colleges, the writing of Thoreau, Melville, Twain, O'Neill, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway...