Review by Choice Review
This recovered manuscript from Thoreau lay jumbled in a box for more than 130 years, and was culled by Dean with loving devotion from some 1,000 pages of scrawls. Wild Fruits appears to have been a draft or two away from completion, as some sections are represented by a single line or two, but the bulk of the book is extensively developed and is classic Thoreau. A complex, intriguing book that can be read at several levels, it was probably intended primarily as a natural history diary that chronicled the ripening of native fruit crops through the growing season, but it is also full of early botanical references, comments about the purity of native fruits, and notes on the agriculture of the period. The largest sections deal with wild apples, blueberries, and strawberries. The book is illustrated by a few of Thoreau's crude drawings, a few samples of manuscript pages, and a number of beautiful line drawings by Abigail Rorer. About 70 percent comprise the writings of Thoreau; the remainder includes a Thoreau chronology, references, and extensive editor's notes. Inside the cover are maps of the area around Concord, Massachusetts, where Thoreau made his observations. General readers. J. Hancock; Michigan State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
This acutely observant, elegantly composed, and prescient work remained unpublished after Thoreau's death at age 44 in 1862 because no one could read his cryptic handwriting until Dean, who lives and works at the Thoreau Institute in Massachusetts, broke the code and performed a heroic feat of decipherment. Thoreau's resounding last work grew out of his immersion in the study of botany and his vigilant attention to the plants living in his environs. He watched for, he writes, "all the divine features" of nature, then recorded his experiences in a narrative that Dean rightly characterizes as a "uniquely American scripture." Following the course of a year, Thoreau's earth gospel consists of detailed descriptions of such wild fruits as blueberries, huckleberries, apples, cranberries, and acorns interwoven with galvanizing commentary on the importance of wilderness to our well-being. The revered writer's perspective on such subjects as the Indian way of living versus his own civilization's, and his assertion that places of great natural beauty should be "purchased and protected" by the state so that everyone can enjoy them, are as sagacious now as they were then, and even more crucial as environmental issues become ever more urgent and complex. --Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Thoreau's Walden (1854) is regarded both as a masterpiece of American prose and as a forerunner of modern environmentalism. Its author spent much of the 1850s learning what botany could teach him about the New England woods he chronicled. Thoreau brought that knowledge to bear on this sometimes very beautiful essay about plants, fruits and nuts, left incomplete at his death in 1862 and here printed for the first time. Thoreau's brief preface echoes the passions of Walden: "What are all the oranges imported into England to the hips and haws in her hedges?" The rest of the work is arranged fruit by fruit: we begin with elm-fruit ("most mistake the fruit before it falls for leaves, and we owe to it the first deepening of the shadows in our streets"), and proceed through several dozen entries to sassafras, skunk cabbage, strawberries, cranberries, juniper berries and, finally, "winter fruits." Though many plants' entries comprise just a few sentences, some offer plenty of room to meditate. Huckleberries prompt a 20-page essay, and pitch pine leads Thoreau to explain how "the restless pine seeds go dashing over [snow] like an Esquimaux sledge with an invisible team until, losing their wings or meeting with some insuperable obstacle, they lie down once for all, perchance to rise up pines." Though the book as a whole reads like the rough draft it is, plenty of individual essays and sentences retain Thoreau's famous confidence and attention. Editor and Thoreau scholar Dean (Faith in a Seed) appends copious notes, along with passages from Thoreau's still unpublished, unfinished The Dispersion of Seeds. Illustrations by Abigail Rorer. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Finally, the publication of Thoreau's last work, previously unavailable because the manuscript had been so hard to decipher. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A work that has escaped publication since Thoreau wrote it, Wild Fruits will only strengthen the author's renown for his unique voice. A keeper of the Thoreau flame and Thoreau scholar, Bradley Dean (editor of a similar Thoreau work, Faith in a Seed, 1993, prematurely described in these pages as ``no doubt [the] final Thoreau book of the century''), has now transcribed and brought to life still another of the Concord naturalist and philosopher's manuscripts that was never published in his lifetime. It is, as Dean wisely characterizes it, both a sacramental and scriptural work. The product of years of naturalistic observation, these lovely essays'some extended, some as short as a sentence'about flowers, bushes, and trees were originally culled by their author for lectures he delivered. They reveal his characteristic Transcendentalist views, his never-ending search ``to find God in nature.'' A mix of empirical science, philosophical speculation, and occasionally tart wit, they are wonderfully pleasing for the knowledge they evince and for their calm, melodious cadences. Fortunately, too, Thoreau the keen and distinctive thinker is ever-present. Indignant, for example, at his contemporaries' failure to appreciate the huckleberry, he likens their obtuseness to the loss of ``natural rights,'' thus giving fresh meaning to an ancient term. While never intruding on'in fact, scarcely explaining'Thoreau's prose, Dean artfully provides notes glossing terms, names, and references that might be obscure to a modern reader. He thus makes this 150-year-old work fully accessible to everyone. A work of often incandescent prose likely to find many readers among historians, naturalists, literary scholars, and, most of all, those who have long loved and learned from the author of Walden and other beloved texts. (Line drawings throughout; 3 facsimile manuscript pages.)
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Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
