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.