Review by New York Times Review
I READ KEVIN dann's "Expect Great Things" on four consecutive mornings on the shores of Walden Pond. I usually drive to Walden, but cars - loud, efficient, mechanical - aren't meant for the spiritual pilgrimage Dann, a historian and naturalist, intends to initiate with this transcendental biography of Henry David Thoreau. So I walked, reading as attentively as I could. A reader expecting great things from Dann's book will certainly encounter aspects of Thoreau he or she has never seen before. Far from the well-worn paths of academic scholarship, Dann acquaints his reader with a protagonist who is an American mystic, a new-age prophet, a cosmic explorer. Whether this man is actually the historical Thoreau, however, seems largely beside the point for Dann. The point is to use Thoreau as a spiritual guide to the unseen. Henry David Thoreau, born 200 years ago next July, is widely regarded as America's first environmental guru. This iconic status, however, was long in coming and, in many ways, ironic. Thoreau was viewed by most of his contemporaries as a highly eccentric crank, his best friends being the children who followed him around the Concord woods gathering huckleberries. The bearded saunterer's enduring popularity has turned on a paring-down of his spiritual eccentricities in order to fit an increasingly reductionist conception of the natural world. Modernity's vision of nature is narrow and devoid of magic, which in turn, according to Dann, constricts our understanding of its guardian, Thoreau. As a corrective, Dann conjures a naturalist-magician. The methodology of "Expect Great Things" is, at the risk of understatement, unusual. It assiduously avoids almost all of the secondary literature on Thoreau written in the last 30 years, including Robert Richardson's still definitive 1986 biography, "Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind," and Alan Hodder's more recent "Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness." And Dann merely glosses the writings that Thoreau himself published in the 44 years of his life: "Walden," "Civil Disobedience," "Walking" - the keystone texts of his corpus - receive only a passing treatment. For better and for worse, Dann takes the road less traveled, leading a reader into out-of-the-way places, through hidden passages in Thoreau's personal life. The book, arranged chronologically, consists in a careful (bordering on obsessive) reading of Thoreau's journals and letters, revealing a boy interested in the occult, ghost stories and magic, a teenager who pored over Arthurian legend and Greek mythology, and a man who interpreted the workings of nature through astrology and Native American shamanism. "The stars awaken a certain reverence," Thoreau's friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in "Nature," "because though always present, they are inaccessible; but all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence." On Dann's reading, Thoreau was consistently drawn to such elemental forces, present but forever inaccessible, leading him to experience, rather than reduce, the mysteries of nature. "Antebellum science," Dann writes by contrast, "sought to expunge 'secrecy' - in the sense of the quiet cultivation of a mysterious sacramental relation to nature - from its practices and feelings." This is Dann at his most insightful. Thoreau's life and writings stood against the current of scientism that prevailed in his time and that continues to define our intellectual culture. In 1849, the year that Thoreau began his habit of taking afternoon walks, he anticipates this trend, writing: "Science applies a finite rule to the infinite - & is what you can weigh & measure & bring away. Its sun no longer dazzles us and fills the universe with light." Dann also wants to prime his reader to be, once again, dazzled by the cosmos. When he selects passages from Thoreau's letters and journals, he often achieves this worthy goal. As the book unfolds, however, it becomes clear that in urging us to expect great things, Dann often asks his reader to expect too much. From the outset, Dann takes liberties that few contemporary biographers have dared. Writing on the edge between the evocative and florid, Dann announces at the beginning of the book that "Concord would become the magic circle into which this nascent master of the elementáis would soon draw his own - and America's - destiny." As Thoreau approached middle age, he was continually affected by the mystical forces of nature - particularly the full moon - and, according to Dann, his "subtle organism" would lift "out of his physical body, opening him more fully to spiritual currents." In summoning the prophetic Thoreau, "Expect Great Things" often reads like the musings of a semi-convincing fortuneteller. Dann pores over Thoreau's journals - filled with graceful observations of the natural world - in search of divine significance and supernatural patterns. Unfortunately, this search is sometimes more like a stretch, particularly when Dann overreaches into the realms of numerology and astrology. "Born in the seventh month of the year, the rhythm of the seven was seemingly inscribed into Thoreau's most significant experiences and tasks." In seven years, Dann breathlessly tells us, "Walden" would undergo seven revisions. Thoreau's "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" would take seven years to complete and reflected the seven days of the week. "Thoreau" has seven letters. Lucky number seven, according to numerologists, is the number of a seeker. Therefore, Q.E.D., Thoreau is a seeker. The conclusion might be correct, but it's cheapened by Dann's sleights of hand. MANY READERS AND Writers have been drawn to Thoreau's keen, almost superhuman, powers of observation, to the idea that something so little - the smallest leaf, the faintest breeze - could be felt so profoundly and mean so much. When Thoreau encounters a rare pinxter flower in 1853, it would be enough to suggest that he was attuned to the almost nonexistent. But this isn't enough for Dann. He gilds the lily, excitedly observing that the pinxter flower derives its name from Pentecost, "when the newly baptized wore white robes signifying their exalted state." The implication for Dann is clear: "The pinxter flower was emblematic of a kind of personal Pentecost for Thoreau; he could now ... speak in nature's own tongue, baptizing others not yet anointed with such grace." At this moment, and many others, it feels as if Dann is trying to convert, rather than convince, his reader. Lilies don't need to be gilded. And Thoreau's writings don't need to be embellished. "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity," Thoreau commands three (not seven) times. Thoreau was, in fact, deeply interested in identifying and experiencing nature's often overlooked cycles: the ebb and flow of water, the passing of the seasons, the repeated emergence of the dawn. Life was best lived, for many Transcendentalists, in accord with these sacred rhythms. And they were, for Thoreau, deeply and personally sacred. This is the focal point of "Expect Great Things," and it is one that is vitally important in a materialistic age that risks losing its senses, spiritual and otherwise. By the end of the book, Dan refocuses on what is most essential about Thoreau today - here is a life well and freely spent, without regret, in the service of higher, if not genuinely transcendental, ideals. "Expect Great Things" is eccentric, strange, even far-fetched, but nonetheless admirable - a bit like Henry David Thoreau. ? Dann gives us Thoreau as a naturalist-magician with almost supernatural powers. JOHN kaag is the author of "American Philosophy: A Love Story."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Famous as the nature-loving visitor to Walden Pond, Thoreau felt a pull beyond nature from a different regional pond Nagog Pond home, according to Algonquin legends, to a specter called the Wanderer. In the great naturalist's attraction to this potent spirit, Dann recognizes a telling manifestation of a formative fascination with mystical realms beyond the normal and scientific boundaries of the natural. Readers glimpse this fascination in the writer's youthful love for magical and cabalistic lore, his later passion for the Arthurian Elf Queen and her elfin court, and his mature gravitation toward Native American myths. Ever watchful for irruptions of the noumenal into the physical, Thoreau believed even his dreams opened the door to fairie messengers. Especially pressed to look beyond the physical by the premature deaths of his brother and older sister, Thoreau fed his hope for immortality with intense (if idiosyncratic) readings of Christian and Hindu scripture. Eager to ratify Thoreau's radically individualistic spirituality, Dann indulges in excessively negative characterizations of some contemporary group strivings for the transcendent, in his characterization of Mormonism, even descending to invidious distortions. But in plumbing Thoreau's own singular and profoundly personal quest for the infinite, he delivers keen insights. A refreshing new perspective on an American icon.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Dann (Lewis Creek Lost and Found) conducts a graceful, attentive inquiry into the mind of Henry David Thoreau, "mystic, transcendentalist, and natural philosopher." Dann acknowledges Thoreau's place among fellow transcendentalists Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but is more interested in the experiences that led Thoreau to his oracular poetry and the intense study of the natural world recorded in his journals. This book depicts Thoreau's scrupulous observations as both scientific and reverent, eschewing the mechanical and analytical for "a relational, sympathetic science" that saw the world as numinous and alive with spirits. It dives so deeply into the project of mapping Thoreau's internal landscape that the outline of his outer life-his work, his relationships, even his famous experiment at Walden Pond of "the very serious business of living authentically"-seems only lightly sketched in comparison. Dann shows an ease with the metaphysical (which is typically considered at odds with the discipline of the historian), making a warm, sympathetic argument for Thoreau as a mystic and visionary and redefining his reputation as an "indefatigable measurer of trees and truth." (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Dann (Across the Great Border Fault) is a historian and naturalist rather than a literary critic, therefore the focus of his study of Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) is on the author as naturalist and social thinker. Thoreau's prevailing themes (against materialism, the love of solitude, plain speaking, engaging with the physical world, etc.) were constants throughout his life. Dann uses extensive quotations from his subject's writings, including correspondence, journals, and notebooks; especially welcome are many excerpts from the less well-known poetry. Thoreau's love of nature is evident. Dann is especially good in detailing -Thoreau's relationship with other transcendentalists, particularly his lifelong friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Chapters cover many unusual aspects of Thoreau's life and work: mysticism and being a seer, visions of fairies and the supernatural world, mythology, the Mormon Church, mesmerism, John Brown (Thoreau was an ardent abolitionist), etc. This book is slightly repetitive, and the many details on plants, animals, and birds could have been excised or shortened, but it's a good introduction to Thoreau's themes and interests. VERDICT For all Thoreau devotees, who will welcome the sympathetic overview of the author's full life and enthusiasms.-Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, Brooklyn © Copyright 2016. 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 sympathetic biography of the famed 19th-century transcendentalist.Commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), historian and naturalist Dann (Lewis Creek Lost and Found, 2001, etc.) offers a reappraisal of the writers life, focusing on Thoreaus connection to, and celebration of, the invisible and ineffable. To support his analysis, Dann draws largely from Thoreaus journals, letters, and published writings as well as a three-volume work by Emerson scholar Kenneth Walter Cameron, Transcendentalists and Minerva: Cultural Backgrounds of the American Renaissance with Fresh Discoveries in the Intellectual Climate of Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreaunbsp;(1958), one of the few secondary sources he references. Dann does not differ from other biographers who examine Thoreaus self-description as a mystic, but he underscores the significance of mysticism, pantheism, and empathy to the writers personality and life choices. Based on Thoreaus admiration for Sir Walter Raleigh and Raleighs esteem for astrology, Dann asserts that Thoreau was convinced that the stars played down into human life. Thoreau articulated his sense of his own personal destiny by using the language of the stars and believed in a personal guiding star. Dann explains Thoreaus depression in 1852 as caused by a planetary configuration called the black moon." Dann also asserts that Thoreau was attuned to the ways of the faerie world, although he revealed his encounters with faeries in an understated, cryptic form of reporting so as not to incite his contemporaries derision. Although Thoreau thought mesmerism and spiritualism were idiotic, he was fascinated by the invisible fluid that formed the basis of popular vitalist theories. Despite proclaiming repugnance for the Church, Thoreau, Dann believes, identified with Christ the fellow heretic. Because he privileges Thoreaus reveries over his philosophical and political grounding, Danns argument at times seems insistent rather than persuasive, but this should appeal to readers interested in Thoreaus more esoteric beliefs. Thoreau emerges from this admiring portrait as a man richly connected to the cosmos. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
