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Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau Kindle Edition

by Kevin Dann (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.4 55 ratings

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To coincide with the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth in 2017, this thrilling, meticulous biography by naturalist and historian Kevin Dann fills a gap in our understanding of one modern history's most important spiritual visionaries by capturing the full arc of Thoreau's life as a mystic, spiritual seeker, and explorer in transcendental realms.

This sweeping, epic biography of Henry David Thoreau sees Thoreau's world as the mystic himself saw it: filled with wonder and mystery; Native American myths and lore; wood sylphs, nature spirits, and fairies; battles between good and evil; and heroic struggles to live as a natural being in an increasingly synthetic world.

Above all, Expect Great Things critically and authoritatively captures Thoreau's simultaneously wild and intellectually keen sense of the mystical, mythical, and supernatural.

Other historians have skipped past or undervalued these aspects of Thoreau's life. In this groundbreaking work, historian and naturalist Kevin Dann restores Thoreau's esoteric visions and explorations to their rightful place as keystones of the man himself.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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 … Dann takes the road less traveled, leading a reader into out-of-the-way places, through hidden passages in Thoreau’s personal life … Expect Great Things is eccentric, strange, even far-fetched, but nonetheless admirable — a bit like Henry David Thoreau.” --John Kaag, New York Times Book Review

"[I]n plumbing Thoreau’s own singular and profoundly personal quest for the infinite, [Dann] delivers keen insights. A refreshing new perspective on an American icon." -Booklist, starred review

“A graceful, attentive inquiry into the mind of Henry David Thoreau … 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.” –Publishers Weekly

"A reappraisal of the writer's life, focusing on Thoreau's connection to, and celebration of, the invisible and ineffable ... Thoreau emerges from this admiring portrait as a man richly connected to the cosmos." -Kirkus Reviews

“If you think you know all about Thoreau think again. Expect Great Things reintroduces an American icon in a thoroughly fresh and vital way, bringing to crackling life a time and place full of drama, achievement, adventure, and excitement. Thoreau reached spiritual maturity in an age like our own, full of uncertainty and potential. Kevin Dann’s highly readable prose places Thoreau amid an assortment of eccentric characters and shows how his philosophy of solitude and nature may be more relevant today than ever before.” –Gary Lachman, author of The Secret Teachers of the Western World

“A vivid and beautifully written portrait not only of Thoreau but of his milieu. And it does full justice to Thoreau’s nature mysticism.” –Richard Smoley, author of How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible

“Kevin Dann’s biography of Henry David Thoreau offers a refreshing perspective on the most down-to-earth of the Transcendentalists. Dann shows how Thoreau’s free-ranging musings encompassed many of the otherworldly interests of his contemporaries, such as a fascination with faeries, mysterious appearances of gossamer, and other curiosities. Dann makes a strong case that while Thoreau’s writings were grounded in tough-minded observations of nature, his own worldview and ‘sympathetic science’ were far from disenchanted.” –Fred Nadis, author of The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Adventure and Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America

About the Author

Historian, naturalist, and troubadour Kevin Dann is the author of ten books, including Across the Great Border Fault: The Naturalist Myth in America and Lewis Creek Lost and Found. He received his PhD from Rutgers University in American History and Environmental History. Dann has taught at Rutgers, University of Vermont, and the State University of New York. In the spring of 2009, he walked from Montreal to Manhattan to commemorate the 400th anniversaries of Hudson's and Champlain's voyages, and, having crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, decided to make his home there.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01E4WAGLW
Publisher ‏ : ‎ TarcherPerigee (January 3, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 3, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1406 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 397 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,691,981 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #146 in Biographies of Buddhism
- #2,001 in Biographies of Christianity
- #2,208 in Environmentalist & Naturalist Biographies

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4.4 55 ratings

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Ray

Thoreau the Mystic

Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2024

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Ode to Thoreau, in shadows steeped,
Where Walden's waters darkly creep,
In solitude he chose to dwell,
In Nature's grasp, his soul did swell.

A bard of woods and whispering trees,
He found in solitude a key,
To unlock mysteries of the heart,
And from the world, to softly depart.

In Emerson's circle, a murmured name,
Yet in his cabin, his own acclaim,
With pen in hand, he penned his dreams,
In ink, his solitary schemes.

Oh Thoreau, with your eyes so keen,
You saw the world as few have seen,
In every leaf, a whispered tale,
In every breeze, a somber wail.

Your words, a symphony of grief,
Yet in their sorrow, found relief,
For in the depths of Walden's gloom,
You found the light within the tomb.

So let us raise our voices high,
To Thoreau, beneath the sable sky,
For in his solitude, he found his worth,
A poet of the quiet earth.

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Bobby Matherne

Better Than A Biography by A Why’s Man

Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2017

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What makes this better than a biography is that it is written by another “ruminant walker” — a comrade in arms with Henry Thoreau. By the time I reached Chapter 2 of this book, I felt like I was reading Thoreau's Journals again, feeling the same sweet, contemplative mood as I accompanied Henry on his daily walks through the woods for 14 years. Looking at the cover artwork, featuring an artist's sketch of an old daguerreotype, it seems I'm looking into Kevin Dann's blue eyes. I followed Henry's walks through his native Concord, to Cape Cod, to Mt. Ktaadn in Maine, et al, reading about them about 150 years in the future. I followed Kevin's walk from Montreal past Lake Champlain to Brooklyn in real-time. How appropriate for one walker to document the life of another prominent walker. Henry documented the flora and fauna he encountered on his walks; Kevin documented the people and historical places on his walk. Pick up this book and join Kevin as he walks in Henry's footsteps and reports back to us on his progress through life. We know what Henry wrote; now we can begin to understand why he wrote.

In every book I read I look for the eponymous quote, the passage in which the book's title is revealed, and here is where I found it. Thoreau had just been surveying and found flowers he had never seen before in the area.

[[page 258] Owning that "a botanist's experience is full of coincidences," in that thinking about a flower never seen nearly always meant you would find it nearby someday, he turned his botanical experience into a general law of life: "In the long run, we find what we expect." We shall be fortunate then if we expect great things."]

Unfortunately, most people act as if they expect bad things to happen to them, and the universal rule still applies, namely, whatever you suppose is going to happen will likely happen to you. I gave this the form of a rule with an easy to say acronym, EAT-O-TWIST, which stands for Everything Allways Turns - Out - The Way It's Supposed To. When you find yourself supposing something bad might happen, you can quickly say the three-syllable phrase, eat-oh-twist, to remind you to change your own supposing. If you learn to apply this in your own thinking, you will drop every negative concept and replace it with a positive. For example, instead thinking this is going to be bad weather, you'll think we'll get some good weather where we live. If you study hypnosis, you learn that creating vivid images puts people into trance states. The word not cannot remove the negative image you create in your mind, for example, when you say, "This is not going to be a bad day for me." By the time you've thought that, some bad image will have been created in the form of an expectation. Saying, "This is going to be a good day" will create a better expectation. If you truly learn the power of expectation, you will agree with Thoreau that it is best to expect great things. Did Thoreau stop expecting great things for his book Walden when he was storing in a closet 500 unsold copies returned to him by his publisher? Given his statements above, we can predict that he expected great things to come from Walden, and that expectation led to great things, in its enormous popularity throughout the world and the salubrious effects it has had on so many lives.

Did Thoreau have a sense of humor? Not many biographers would notice that. But, yes, he did and admittedly a wry one such as in this story where he is confronted by farmers whose property he must cross for his surveying job. When one of them asked Thoreau if he were lost, not having seen him before on this land, Thoreau mused, "If the truth be known, and had it not been for betraying my secret, I might with more propriety have inquired, 'Are you not lost, as I have never seen you before?'" Who really owns the property but the one who walks it the most often?

Here is Henry's last entry in his Journal.

[[page 340, 341] He then turned to describing the storm of the previous evening and the long striations that the winds had left in the gravel along the railroad causeway. He gave the exact dimensions of the minute tracks: From behind each pebble projected a ridge an eighth of an inch high and an inch long. The very last line in this his very last journal entry reads: "All this is perfectly distinct to an observant eye and yet could easily pass unnoticed by most. Thus each wind is self-registering." With his last steps in life, Thoreau surely was leaving racks that could be made by no other man.]

Henry grew weak and asked Edmund Hosmer to stay the night with him.

[[page 342] The next morning, Sophia read to her brother the "Thursday" section of "A Week" and, anticipating the "Friday" section's description of the exhilarating return journey home, he murmured, "Now comes good sailing." At nine o'clock on the morning of May 6, Henry Thoreau set sail.]

Once more, as I did on Dec. 14, 2009 when I finished reading Volume 14 of his Journals, I am sad as I say Goodbye and Bon Voyage to my fellow traveler whose journey on the Earth ended some eighty years before mine began. I have read your long journals, your Walden, and have saved for later your other books, so that your memory, Henry, will never stay very far out of my consciousness and my soul. This is an excerpt from Bobby Matherne’s full review which can be read in DIGESTWORLD ISSUE DW#173.

18 people found this helpful

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Jim Sherblom

Idiosyncratic naturist

Reviewed in the United States on August 26, 2017

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Dann gives a real feel for what Thoreau cared about, and why, and how it changed over the course of his short life.

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Ouija Bored

“Now comes good sailing”

Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2017

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“Henry Thoreau, the indefatigable measurer of trees and truths, would ask that our measurement of his life hew to the facts, but that we then read those facts with an enlarged sense of meaning.” So ends Kevin Dann’s “life and search” of Henry David Thoreau, in a most fitting manner to the jugful of themes he develops throughout this wonderfully organic portrayal. To paraphrase Emerson’s eulogy for Thoreau, Dann attempts to pierce the poetic veil over Thoreau’s experience to show us what was sacred in his eyes. In this regard the book is a resounding success. Dann does not set out to conform to any mechanism or structure which might commonly be considered a biography, but rather immerses us in the continuity, spirituality, integration, rhythm, sensuality and “metaphysicality” of Thoreau’s life. I found myself drawn into Thoreau’s world in a profound way by Dann, and came away from my reading with a deep impression that I had come to know the man, not merely his life and prose.
Dann has deeply studied the tears in the gossamer fabric of this earthly existence, and applies this perspective in a unique and fascinating way to make his case that Thoreau was afforded glimpses into other dimensions, which he perceives as supreme manifestations most worthy of our attention. The colors and textures, and sense of light, of Thoreau’s observations are brought brightly to the foreground by Dann. His hyper-sensitivity to the physical world, with an exquisite sensuality, and his sense of the flow of time, its pulse, cyclicality and continuity, are strongly reminiscent of the deep meditative state and/or the psychedelic experience. These details helped me to be present in his milieu. Dann so beautifully captures Thoreau’s devotion to set and setting … ”Thoreau had to remain attentive and still for long periods in order to receive the crystalline, finely etched impressions that were characteristic of his perception.”
I wallowed in the smallest details of Thoreau’s observations, as Dann articulated so well. But, and more importantly, I also came to appreciate how Thoreau’s contextual outlook was one of integrated wholeness. The balance between Thoreau’s objective empiricism and his subjective intuition, it seems to me, set him apart from the transcendentalists. It may also, as Dann asserts, have allowed him to not become beholden to what Dann calls the “triumph of mechanistic and materialistic theories of nature” and to maintain an open mind to spiritual, even occultish, thoughts and influences which others often could not, or would not, see. Thoreau himself said, “We shall see but little if we require to understand what we see.”
Thoreau said “…go…by a route of your own making, immersing yourself as fully as possible in the phenomenon, and tell only a few what you find.” I say tell many what you have found here! Five stars.

23 people found this helpful

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José Manuel Pérez Rivera

Very good book

Reviewed in Spain on January 24, 2017

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Good book. One new vision about the life of Henry David Thoreau. This book show another conception for Thoreau. Very recommendable

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