Month: July 2025

Is A River Alive?

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Boat a Fairhaven Bay

After a lapse, I’ve resumed writing book reviews for the Wall Street Journal, a journalism gig that fits my schedule.  My latest is for Robert Macfarlane’s spectacular Is a River Alive? published by Norton in May 2025.  Click here for the review.   I had the pleasure of touring him around Walden Pond in Concord, MA on June 7, 2025 and gifting him my Guide to Walden Pond.

Here’s are the final lines:   “Macfarlane’s evangelical writing does more to convince me that rivers are alive than all the legal, biological and thermodynamic arguments of the act combined. This book is so potent that I felt baptized by the flow of its prose-poetry. I, too, have been “rivered.”

Image shows the Concord Museum’s replica of the Musketaquid on the shore of Fairhaven Bay, a kettle through which the Subbury River runs.  This was Thoreau’s favorite boat, which he built himself in 1849.  Photo courtesy of Juliet Wheeler.

Website Under Construction

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In July 2025 I decided to upgrade my website with the help of Bri Diaz in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.  So I’m now in the process of deleting, updating, and rewriting many of the pages, some of which have been untouched since 2013.  Please bear with me until late August, when the new semester begins.

One of the additions to the site is to create a tab on the homepage titled “Earthly Matters,” which will be my site for random blog postings about whatever catches my attention at the time.

Image of UConn students walking the trail at Walden Pond State Reservation in Concord, MA on one of my field trips.  The trail is cut into  steep collapse slope at the angle of repose for sand and gravel. This is the table of contents page for the first ever Guide to Walden Pond, which I published in 2018 to commemorate the bicentennial of Thoreau’s birth year.