Now Comes Good Sailing

August 9, 2021
Literary agent Blauner (In Their Lives: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs) brings together in this dynamic collection 27 essays on the life of Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and his most famous work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods. The contributors address what about Thoreau’s life and writing inspired them, and what he has to say to readers today. In “My Guidebook to Japan,” Pico Iyer writes that Thoreau’s essays taught him how to appreciate Kyoto, Japan, “by learning to look at everything around me.” Alan Lightman suggests in “To a Slower Life” that the naturalist’s work is a reminder to get back to the beauty of wasting time, while Sherry Turkle writes in “The Year of Not Living Thickly” that technology has made people fearful of the solitude that was so important to Thoreau. In “ ‘The Record of My Love’: Thoreau and the Art of Science,” Michelle Nijhuis honors the author’s close-observation skills. Taken together, the pieces make a convincing case that Thoreau’s work is ever-relevant and deserving of continued wide readership: “Even you, paltry worried creature of the twenty-first century—reach through the general then into particular and then into the stuff of self,” urges Lauren Groff. Thoreau fans will be delighted.

August 15, 2021
A collection of celebrations of the iconic writer. "There are many ways to read Thoreau," Pico Iyer observes, "but none of them will ever be so deep as the ways he reads us, and our most private longings, often so well-hidden that we forget about them ourselves." In graceful, often lyrical essays, the 26 contributors to Blauner's thoughtful collection echo Iyer as they consider Thoreau's meaning in their lives. Most respond to Walden, a book that novelist Amor Towles and NPR reporter and host Stacey Vanek Smith loved passionately when they first read it but others (novelist Lauren Groff, English professor Kristen Case) hated, put off by Thoreau's tone of moral superiority. On later readings, though, their perceptions changed dramatically. "I discovered a love so powerful for Thoreau's energetic vision that it often took my breath away," Groff writes. His "great contribution to literature," she realized, "lies in the wild strangeness of his close reading of nature, the intensity of his insistence that if one looks hard enough, one will see through the scrim of the familiar and into the astonishing gift of singularity." Several contributors consider Thoreau's celebration of solitude. In our wired age of smartphones and the internet, solitude, writes media scholar Sherry Turkle, is challenged by our "habit of turning to our screens rather than looking inward, and by the culture of continual sharing." Alan Lightman asks himself what he loses "when I must be engaged with a project every hour of the day, when I rarely let my mind spin freely without friction or deadlines, when I rarely sever myself from the rush and the heave of the external world." Rafia Zakaria, a Pakistani essayist and historian, visiting Thoreau's farm, thought about "the moral complications" of the solitude that Thoreau chose for himself. Other contributors include Adam Gopnik, Jennifer Finney Boylan, and A.O. Scott. Candid, often insightful reflections testify to Thoreau's enduring appeal.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.