The most recommended Henry David Thoreau books

There are many books about Thoreau and Walden, even for kids. But Frederic Tudor? Who is he, and what is his relation to Thoreau? Curiosity led me to pick up this book; the scope of this little-known historical event kept me turning pages. The two characters are introduced in parallel prose poems. A pond, the third character, connects those different people.

I was entranced by the story of the naturalist and the businessman, both influenced by Walden Pond. While Thoreau wrote notes in his journal, Tudor chopped frozen blocks of ice to ship to India. The author balanced the contrasts between the men with a light hand, backdropped by the seasons. Detailed watercolor and pencil art carry the scale of the account from Thoreau’s tiny cabin to Tudor’s ship crossing the equator. This is nonfiction that transcends mere information—a masterful performance.

I was gifted this book recently and it is the gift that keeps on giving.

I am an avid walker and the way the author interspersed poignant life stories with his own on walking was lovingly poetic. This quote “the walker is king, and the earth is his domain” is the one that defines the entire message of the book. I’ve been on many pilgrimages in life and witnessed many a transformation but none like the ones these philosophers uncover.

It was a joy to read the profound messages in staying present while walking as exercise. Grab a friend and enjoy walking together as you put one foot in front of the other and have meaningful conversation. 

Most books about the future are real bummers. Climate change, war, inequality... the problems seem insurmountable. This book helped me get past those feelings. Yes, we’ve royally screwed things up, but in lyrical prose Ackerman shows us that while it was our ingenuity that led us to screw up the environment, it’s also our ingenuity that can fix it, if we accept the challenge and responsibility. “We can become Earth-restorers,” she claims, “and Earth-guardians.” I like that. 

This is a collection of short and accessible essays by writers and activists who practiced and wrote about non-violence. The essays are thought-provoking and hopeful.

They show us alternative ways of thinking and living that are more critical than ever in a world wracked by violence. The news can be debilitating and leave people feeling hopeless. These essays are inspiring and show us how people found alternatives in the past during difficult historical times.

This book is linked to my own work and writing on non-violence, which discusses the spiritual dimensions of non-violence and why this matters for producing lasting change and justice. 

As a lifelong reader of travel literature, this collection of essays was a real eye-opener.

Each chapter features a different writer, whether it’s about how Thoreau truly felt about living in the wilderness or Summerset Maugham’s traveling companion, Theroux delves deep into what made these people tick—what drove them to travel as much as why they wrote.

The collection made their work more understandable and made the writers seem more human.

Early in the war, writer Louisa May Alcott journeyed to the nation’s capital to care for sick and wounded soldiers. Over a period of six weeks, she experienced firsthand the rigors of life in crowded hospital wards as a nurse to men suffering from disease and wounds. She recorded her observations in a series of accounts printed in a Boston newspaper. These writings formed the basis of Hospital Sketches. Published a month after the end of the Battle of Gettysburg, when the outcome of the war remained uncertain, Alcott’s words encouraged other women to support the U.S. war effort, and remind us today of the critical role of nurses in times of conflict.

Ranging from sweet letters to her family to everyday business correspondence, these letters open up Louisa’s world to me. The reader obtains a snapshot of Louisa’s life and career through her various correspondences as well as glimpses into her writing process and her struggles to write prolificly when her health deteriorates. It was fun to read about her books in the letters and gain insight into the story behind them.

My admiration for this book is demonstrated by the way in which I quite shamelessly ripped off its title for my own. It has been said that America is the only nation that began perfect and hoped to improve. The engine of that improvement, from the earliest days of the Republic, had been new technologies but by the middle of the pre-Civil War period some Americans began to realize that the “improvement” they had unleashed was beginning to erode the very “perfection” that they had hoped to enshrine in the nation’s foundation. Writers, artists, and creative intellectuals in general are society’s canaries in the mine shaft, and the great names of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, George Innes, Charles Sheeler, and their colleagues—attempted to describe, understand, and perhaps heal the destructive effects of the machine. As Marx concludes, “what was a grim possibility… show more.

In November 1915 Hudson was in the care of nurses in a Cornish convent hospital, much burdened by news from the Western Front. ‘Shall I live to see peace on earth again?’ he asked Don Roberto Cunninghame Graham in a letter.

"To me nothing is left but memories, and I’m here putting some of my boyhood’s days in a book which will have a certain interest because it gives a sort of picture of the country and people before it began to be civilised."

He was writing a memoir. A combination of Don Roberto’s missives, fevered dreams, and possibly medication sparked Hudson’s visions of his Pampas childhood. He asked his nurses for paper and pencils and began to scribble what would become his acclaimed memoir, Far Away and Long Ago. Virginia Woolf said she greeted the book "like an old friend". It remains a classic of its genre.

Before I stumbled across this book, I had never heard of Caroline Healey Dall, a prickly but vulnerable and fiercely intelligent Bostonian who knew almost everyone in the various reform movements that swept across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.

On one day, Dall is recording the details of a pregnancy that went horribly wrong; on another, passing along salacious gossip about a lady who propositioned Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May). All the while, she champions the cause of women’s rights while clashing with some of the many strong personalities in the movement.