Rating: 
Summary: Thoughtful Exploration into Personal Satisfaction
Review: Walden invites us to re-examine and weigh our priorities in life. It maximizes the value of our present experience, emphasizes the richness of nature, and diminishes the value and rationality of our struggle for material success. The book is filled with quotes and ideas that inspire a renewed energy and fresh approach to life. It awakens a sense of appreciation for simple pleasures. It promotes a perspective that reflects a more innocent set of values -- that challenge the world's judgement of a man by the money he earns, the car he drives and the possessions he amasses. In an era where excess spells success, it is calming and thought provoking to read about the Thorough's two years in the woods. It strikes a chord of things that we have known all along but have perhaps forgotten. The sights, sounds, and experiences of nature and the scenery provides us with a sensory scale to weigh our priorities and pursue new directions in our lives. Can we attain personal satisfaction and hapiness by simplifying our lives? This book inspires us to try.
Rating:
Summary: Find Yourself, but Not Always In the Woods.
Review: Walden is the most important book that I have ever read. It is instructive, but not to be taken literally. It is not dictating that everyone should go to the woods, but find their own God. For Thoreau that was Nature in the woods, for Thomas Carlyle, Great Leaders. What is it for you?
Rating:
Summary: Thoreau was a genius, like Jerry Garcia
Review: When Thoreau made his great experiment of withdrawal from the social world he went into the woods in order to confront himself and real life. This action , the action of withdrawal and the ensuing revelation have served as inspiration and example for many others overwhelmed by the burdens and business of life. Thoreau however was not an ordinary person in withdrawal. He was a very deep student of Nature and of the philosophical literature of his Time, of Emerson. And he was in tune with the Transcendental spirit of that time that reaching out and beyond to a spiritual reality which in some way would unite all worlds and bring the universal unity of Mankind. The combination of his deep perception of the local physical world and the vast stretch of his richly metaphoric mind help make one of the great American classics.
This work is so aphoristically rich that it is difficult to read it as simple consecutive prose. As with Emerson one must pause and rethink the various aphorisms given us. But one thing, the spirit, the spirit of hope of intellectual adventure of faith in a greatness and goodness in Nature carry us forward. As Thoreau said " There is new day to dawn , the sun is but a morning star"
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