An insightful book that reads Walden; Or, Life in the Woods not as a literary or philosophical text but as a series of geological experiments.
Los Angeles Review of Books - Daegan Miller
Utterly fascinating… In studying Thoreau’s own debts to the science-writers of his time, Thorson opens up Walden from its sometimes insular grandeur and grounds (so to speak) its mythopoetics in the physical properties of the place Thoreau made famous.
Open Letters Monthly - Steve Donoghue
Most people know Thoreau as an environmental essayist, a 19th-century naturalist, and a commentator and an essayist on social and political matters. Through a detailed reading of Thoreau’s Journal and Walden , Thorson shows that Thoreau was a competent scientist with expertise in limnology, geology, hydrology, and ecology. He also had a fundamental understanding of the effects of glaciers on landscapes.
Walden's Shore has no predecessor in the field of Thoreau studies. It is a welcome addition and a needed reassessment of an iconic figure.
Thorson says that literary types haven’t had the scientific chops to recognize, among other things, Thoreau’s ‘genius for river channel hydraulics’ and how close he came to discovering glacial theory (then unformed, now proved) to explain his terrain of erratic boulders and kettle ponds. Thorson says that Thoreau changed from ‘science light’ to ‘science heavy’ around 1851, and his writing shed much of the ecstatic divine metaphors for a style closer to field notes.
Boston Globe - Katherine Whittemore
Walden’s Shore is a serious, substantial, and impressively erudite entry into the field—a model for how interdisciplinary approaches can bring original and revelatory perspectives to bear on even the most well-worn texts… Thorson’s careful reconstruction of Thoreau’s likely knowledge of landscape formation and glacial theory is especially impressive, and constitutes a comprehensive account of Thoreau’s relation to what was apparently a major scientific controversy of the mid-19th century.
PopMatters - James Williams
In his 1854 masterpiece Walden , the U.S. writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau invites us to ‘wedge our feet downward…till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality.’ Geologist Robert Thorson obliges, focusing on Thoreau as a flinty amateur geologist to reinject science into his literary legacy. Thoreau, Thorson persuasively argues, was as grounded in rock as he was in the elemental understanding of the cosmos sought by the Transcendentalist movement.
The work of an extraordinary mind. Thorson seeks to ground what is arguably the greatest piece of non-fiction produced in America, and one of the world's classics, not in the field of language where it has long been situated but rather in the material universe with which Thoreau extensively interacted and on which he long meditated. He stunningly succeeds in this effort.
What emerges from Walden’s Shore is a portrait of Thoreau in transition, pulled in one direction by the force of his poetic genius and keen eye for humanity’s foibles, on the one hand, and, on the other, a thinker whose insights make him more of a ‘curiosity-driven scientist’…Whereas many of us are used to literary critics sticking their toes into scientific waters—sometimes to their discomfiture—it is rare to find a scientist who knows and appreciates a literary masterpiece the way Thorson does and can write about it with aplomb. Thorson’s affection for the book and its author is clear.
Environmental History - William Major
Fascinating… Thorson presents the strongest version yet of the argument that, by the time he reached his early thirties, Thoreau was a scientist. Thorson provides a vivid core sample of Thoreau’s middle career, a dense, compelling vision of the geodynamics of Walden Pond, and an unexpectedly personal picture of Thoreau’s relation to nineteenth-century science… The great strength of Walden’s Shore , then, lies in its absorbing analytical presentation, through geo-scientific eyes, of topographies familiar to Thoreauvians—of Walden Pond, the Journal, and Walden itself—all lucidly explained for a nontechnical audience. Those of us who have become devoted to the place, the book, and its author owe Robert Thorson a debt of gratitude along with a heap of royalties.
Thoreau Society Bulletin - William Rossi
In his 1854 masterpiece Walden , the U.S. writer and naturalist Henry David Thoreau invites us to ‘wedge our feet downward…till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality.’ Geologist Robert Thorson obliges, focusing on Thoreau as a flinty amateur geologist to reinject science into his literary legacy. Thoreau, Thorson persuasively argues, was as grounded in rock as he was in the elemental understanding of the cosmos sought by the Transcendentalist movement.
Thorson’s fresh approach to Walden looks beyond the work as literary artifact and philosophical treatise, showing it from the perspective of a geologic scientist. What emerges is a fascinating study of Thoreau’s close attention to geology and an exploration of his interest in theories of geological evolution.
American Scientist - Dianne Timblin
2013-10-03Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America's Kettle Lake and Ponds , 2009, etc.) follows up his earlier work by establishing Henry David Thoreau's own scientific credentials. The author adds depth to the iconic image of Thoreau, revered for his contributions to the American literary renaissance and his role as a social reformer. Thorson uses Thoreau's journals as a source for his contention that he had a keen interest in geology and the emerging theories of geological evolution reflected in Charles Darwin's Journal of Researches (1851), which Thoreau read with great interest. He cites notations predating The Origin of Species that anticipated Darwin's theory of natural selection--e.g., how "individual fitness, adaptation, co-evolution, and competition" shaped the evolution of animals and plants. Thoreau accepted the correct view of Swiss paleontologist Louis Agassiz about how glaciation shaped the geology and ecology of the region--a view rejected by American geologists for theological reasons. Thorson explains that his purpose is "to counterbalance what strikes me as a recent trend in eco-criticism that refracts science through literature without being scientific." He seeks to dig deeper than the "wave of marketing Thoreau as the symbolic ‘green man,' " in which his scientific interests are often overlooked. The author takes issue with such authors as Leo Marx, who reduced the inner meaning of Walden to "the dialectic tension between industrial progress and the timeless beauty of nature." Marx and others often bypassed Thoreau's intellectual connection to the ideas that were animating Darwin and the geologists, such as Charles Lyell, who helped shape Darwin's thought. Thorson suggests that seasonal change and the contrast in Walden Pond between summer and winter is a metaphor for Thoreau's own mind, which "toggled [between] poetic and scientific." An intriguing academic book best read in conjunction with Walden .
