Henry David Thoreau ( July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and "Yankee" love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs. He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Thoreau is sometimes cited as an anarchist. Though Civil Disobedience seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government - "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government" - the direction of this improvement points toward anarchism: "'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." Richard T. Drinnon partly blames Thoreau for the ambiguity, noting that Thoreau's "sly satire, his liking for wide margins for his writing, and his fondness for paradox provided ammunition for widely divergent interpretations of 'Civil Disobedience'."

Product Description: This field guide to the fascinating alpine areas of New England is updated, expanded, and as practical as ever. The highest ranges of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont are home to a splendid world of alpine flowers, colorful mosses and lichens, and many animals that survive there despite the difficult terrain and extremely severe weather...read more

Product Description: Whether you’re walking in the woods or along the beach, camping, hiking, canoeing, or just enjoying your own backyard, this book will help identify all your nature discoveries. With authoritative and broad coverage, using nontechnical and lively language and more than 2,000 color photographs, this guide is an essential reference for nature lovers living in or visiting New England...read more

Product Description: An engaging and accessible introduction to the natural world in New England and upstate New York.

'Ten essays that interweave the author's first-hand experiences and those of the great American writer/naturalist Henry David Thoreau with their respective reflections on the importance of preserving wild places and the causes of change'--Provided by publisher.

More than 170 full-color photographs capture the rich natural beauty and diversity of New England, from the rugged peaks and forests of New Hampshire's White Mountains, to the sandy beaches of Cape Cod, to the rocky coastline of Maine and beyond.

Product Description: Back by popular demand, this practical field guide captures the splendor of the rare, yet accessible, alpine zone of northern New England. This fascinating ecosystem is an enchanting world of delicate flowers, hardy plants, and remarkable wildlife that survive in the harsh and unpredictable climate of New England's highest peaks from Vermont to Maine, including Mounts Mansfield, Lafayette, Washington, and Katahdin...read more

A collection of essays, meditations, narratives, and illustrations takes readers on a seasonal tour of the natural wonders of the New England landscape and the plants, animals, and people that make it their home, revealing everything from the glorious color of autumn, to the harsh New England winter, to his delight at the first pussy willow of spring. Original.

Explains why, 150 years after the publication of Walden, this key work of Henry David Thoreau remains fascinating and important, in an in-depth look at the life of the author and his ideas on personal growth, with special interest paid to the later phases of his career.

Product Description: For families, for teachers and students, and for those who just love natural New England, a thoughtfully written book exploring the nature we see all around us in New England, in a beautifully illustrated, month-by-month format. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Welcome to New England the way Frank Woolner saw it. His lyrical reflections invoke the sometimes harsh, sometimes tranquil beauty of this world. Equal parts sportsman and naturalist, Frank Woolner found wonder in everything from welcoming a chickadee to his open hand to fighting a surging Atlantic salmon, and all with a twinkle of wry Yankee humor...read more

Product Description: “We live with a myth about New England,” write naturalists Nona Bell Estrin and Charles W. Johnson: “that we have four distinct seasons here.” As careful and experienced observers of the natural world, Estrin and Johnson know that nature’s progressions are gradual, continuous, and interconnected...read more

Product Description: In 1977 David Foster took to the woods of New England to build a cabin with his own hands. Along with a few tools he brought a copy of the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Foster was struck by how different the forested landscape around him was from the one Thoreau described more than a century earlier...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Henry Beston, whose Outermost House is generally considered an imperishable classic of nature writing, was a poet who just happened to write prose. He was a meticulous observer, an early (and unsung) conservationist, and a prolific writer of letters, essays, and poetry, as well as books...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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A portrait of New England's forests chronicles their development from the pre-colonial era to the present through a study of natural patterns, explaining how readers can come to understand landscape mysteries by exploring animal habitats, the growths of native trees, and the disappearance of specific natural elements. Reissue.

Gathers essays from each of the author's books, covering wildlife, seasons on Cape Cod, the complexity of nature, and the world of the senses (view table of contents)

Identifies the region's plant and animal life, offers an overview of natural history, and describes the area's beaches, parks, preserves, and forests (view table of contents)

These 33 essays are the narrative of an outdoor enthusiast on a seasonal round that is seeded with wit, passionate environmental protest, and glad praise for the threatened but still gorgeous landscapes of a high mountain valley.

Product Description: Book by Bennett, Dean B.

Hay revisits the New Hampshire of his youth, describing the natural beauty he witnessed