Six walks In the footsteps of Henry David Thoreau

Life is intense for Shattuck. Emotions run deep, his dreams are harrowing. An artist, curator, and writer, he is humbled and awed by nature, curious about people, and amusingly self-deprecating. He lives with admirable fluidity and creativity, even when confronted by a painful and alarming hand injury and the miseries of Lyme disease. It is grief over a failed relationship that propels him to trace the paths taken by Thoreau, whose passionately precise accounts of his epic walks and close observations are fundamental to American nature writing. With deep family roots in Massachusetts, Shattuck knows the New England terrain Thoreau so assiduously explored, but his expeditions tend to veer into precarious, often amusing predicaments requiring the kind intervention of strangers. As Shattuck chronicles the six ambitious walks he takes over the years in warmly confiding prose and expressive, richly textured drawings, he also recounts passages in Thoreau's life and quotes from his writings, notes how invaluable Thoreau's meticulous documentation of the living world is to scientists, and marks how dramatically human endeavors and climate change have altered the land since Thoreau took its measure. Shattuck's involving and poignant chronicle of immersions in nature, misadventures, family history, and a love story is shaped by his preternatural gift for discerning the essence of each moment and each place.

In this resplendent debut, Pushcart Prize winner Shattuck traipses from quiet elegy to compassionate celebration through a series of jaunts patterned after Henry David Thoreau's rambles. Hoping to escape "a constellation of grief" over a breakup, Shattuck set out one May to walk the beaches of Cape Cod, retracing the footsteps of Thoreau. What started as a distraction turned into six separate treks, vividly brought to life here in Shattuck's poetic retelling. On his first outing, a serendipitous meeting delivers him to the oysterman's cottage where Thoreau slept 150 years earlier. When Shattuck's later diagnosed with Lyme disease, he's spurred to tackle two hikes: up Maine's Katahdin and Massachusetts's Wachusett mountains--where Thoreau walked after his brother's death and, like Shattuck, found "consolation" in the stars, "displac bulging selfhood, under the shadow of such urgent beauty as the night sky." After getting engaged, Shattuck returned to his roamings with a lighter heart, traveling to his family's ancestral home in Sakonnet Harbor; the northernmost point of Thoreau's Maine walk; and Cape Cod again, where he reconciled his grief as a necessary "period of fragility that brings your emotions closest to the surface." Echoing Thoreau's brilliant reflections with his own, Shattuck distills the healing power of nature into a narrative that's a pure pleasure to wander through. Fans of Annie Dillard will find this mesmerizing. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. (Apr.)

A memoir about walking in Thoreau's path. Shattuck, artist and director of Maine's Cuttyhunk Island Writers' Residency program, channels the writings of Thoreau in this reflective foray into the oft-traveled world of walking. After reading Thoreau's Cape Cod and in a fit of anguished nightmares and restlessness, Shattuck decided that now was the time to set off. Beginning at Massachusetts' Nauset dunes, he searched for the small shack in Wellfeet where the iconic writer stayed. "Walking through the pines around Wellfleet's seven outer ponds," he writes, "my footfalls silenced by carpets of ochre and shed needles, I quickly got lost." Two days later, he reached Provincetown, where he experienced "exactly what I wanted--to be obliterated by the insistent presence of the sea, as the sea had done to Cape Cod." Dealing with medications for Lyme disease, Shattuck hiked other Thoreau destinations, including Mount Katahdin, Wachusett Mountain, and Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond, where he took a dip. Throughout, Shattuck interweaves Thoreau's writings with his own observations, reflecting on the geographical changes caused by climate change and urban sprawl as well as the stars that Thoreau described as "our fellow-travelers still, as high and out of our reach as our own destiny." The narrative sputters when it shifts to Shattuck's time in Rhode Island, where family had lived, his relationship with his wife, Jenny, and an unfortunate accident years ago with a boat's gunwale that resulted in the loss of the top part of his middle finger. Reliving Thoreau's hiking and canoeing adventures in northern Maine's Allagash Wilderness Waterway gets Shattuck back into his enthusiastic, poetic stride, describing the same black flies that had also accosted Thoreau, listening to bird song, and observing a double rainbow. Accompanied by Jenny, he concludes with a return visit to Provincetown, wanting the "revelation that came at the end of my first Cape walk: that following Henry led to hidden, unexpected goodness." The author's black-and-white illustrations dot the narrative. Wistful and meditative, sparked by lovely prose. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.