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A review by earwicker
Walden & Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
4.0
Thoreau is a great writer, despite his misanthropy and occasional moments of arrogance. Thoreau does not care what anyone else thinks, and he doesn't think you should care what other people think either. He describes his first year at Walden in intimate detail, and then sums up the second year in a sentence, saying it was pretty much the same. Surely he had some observations during that second year that we might find enlightening, but no. He's done. I find his grumpiness amusing, though I can see how others might not.
"Civil Disobedience" comes closer to the kind of rumination I would expect from a friend and colleague of Emerson. I'm not sure that Thoreau accepted or appreciated the label "transcendentalist," but he gets lumped in with them anyway. (He said at one point that if he didn't want to explain himself he would just tell his audience he was a transcendentalist.) Civil Disobedience is a powerful and thoughtful piece of writing, cited by dissidents from Gandhi to Mandela. It makes me uncomfortable in all the right ways.
"Civil Disobedience" comes closer to the kind of rumination I would expect from a friend and colleague of Emerson. I'm not sure that Thoreau accepted or appreciated the label "transcendentalist," but he gets lumped in with them anyway. (He said at one point that if he didn't want to explain himself he would just tell his audience he was a transcendentalist.) Civil Disobedience is a powerful and thoughtful piece of writing, cited by dissidents from Gandhi to Mandela. It makes me uncomfortable in all the right ways.