I didn't always agree with Sullivan but I thoroughly enjoyed his approach. ( )

Now, if you’re going to write a book called The Thoreau You Don’t Know, you better give the reader something big and blazing that we don’t know about him, especially to those diehard fans out there like me. Of course I’m writing this review from a different perspective since I do know a lot about him, having read Walden over ten times, and many biographies on his life. I can see what the writer was trying to do, show him in a different light than as a prophet of nature that lived in the woods. But honestly, I have to say I didn’t learn much about Thoreau in this book that I didn’t already know. I do like how the writer goes into the transcendental movement, and gives some context to his life. He also does an excellent job starting chapters. The sentences that begin each one grab the reader, and keep him interested. I think they are the best chapter beginnings I have ever read of any nonfiction book. Still after reading I didn’t really get a sense of a new Thoreau, or the real Thoreau. The only way to do that is to read Walden many times and his essays, particularly the one on John Brown, the abolitionist. Then we see who this passionate man really is.
I wish the writer had changed the title of this book, because it is a great book for those who don't know much about him. I just felt the title was misleading to those who do. ( )

Robert Sullivan smashes our myth of Thoreau as the technophobic, misanthropic, tree-hugging loner and in its place depicts another man, one who grew up in Concord, but went to college at Harvard, grew melons and threw an annual melon party for his Concord neighbors, took over the family business (a pencil factory!) when his father died, and accidently set fire to the woods near town. An excellent biography of Thoreau by a thoroughly enjoyable writer [ full review ] ( )

Sullivan succeeds in giving Thoreau flesh and blood and confirms the relevance of his message for the modern world. Josh Hogan ( )

This book is both social and intellectual history centered on Henry David Thoreau. It is written fairly well, there's just too much of it, it is more than I ever wanted to know about Thoreau.

Sullivan is at pains to describe the conventional wisdom on Thoreau and then to demolish it. The CW says that the man was an unsociable, humorless hermit. On the contrary, he was well-known in Concord, considered eccentric by some, but a fixture in the town. He used humor to get his points across more easily. He was not anti-technology, he did in fact design some machines and improve others. He was an abolitionist, and, though he wrote a precedent-setting essay on civil disobedience, he was never a pacifist and supported John Brown's raid despite its violence.

The author is also good at giving the context of the times. From our future-shocked era, the mid-nineteenth century may not seem like a time of great change, but it was. First of all was the overwhelming change in travel due to the railroads... a real game-changing event that made distances much smaller. Printing presses kept making technological advances that made printed material cheaper and more widely available.

In all of this, Thoreau spent most of his life studying the ecology of one town, Concord, Massachusetts. He made his study of this small ecology into a vast commentary on the topic of ecology, and for that he has an assured place in American intellectual history. ( )