GTWP - Reviews | Robert Thorson

Wall Street Journal

Mr. Thorson is a lucid writer… But if he is insistently instructive, it’s perhaps because he has so much to teach. Odd facts freckle every page.

Danny Heitman

About half a million people visit Walden Pond State Reservation annually. Many come because of Henry David Thoreau’s book, “Walden,” which remains at least as popular as it was 150 years ago….The new “Guide to Walden Pond,” connects the dots between the book and the place. …The book is a narrative journey that makes a complete loop around the pond, going back in time to Thoreau’s world, and returning to the modern world again.

Heather Goldstone, WCAI Living Lab Radio

Boston Globe

Unlike most treatises about the revered locale in Concord, “The Guide to Walden Pond” by Robert M. Thorson is a step-by-step guide to the place where Henry David Thoreau lived, wrote, and philosophized for more than two years. Published last month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in collaboration with the Walden Woods Project, the 250-page book explores the people who played a role in Walden Pond, historical events, plants, and animals related to 15 stops around the shoreline.

Cindy Cantrell

Providence Journal

Thorson’s book details the synergistic relationship between Thoreau as writer, thinker and naturalist and his favorite habitat. Packed with colorful photographs, text and maps, the book guides the reader around Walden Pond, starting at the Visitor Center at 915 Walden St., Concord, and meandering counterclockwise around the shore. Along the way, Thorson highlights the pond’s glacial origins and composition, its flora and fauna and its various uses over the centuries. The invisible thread linking all of this is Thoreau’s time at the pond.

Betty Cotter

Literary Hub

Excerpt titled: “Did Thoreau actually live at the pond?”

Boston Metrowest

AThorson’s guidebook and research rescues Thoreau from a public image largely fashioned by English professors who focused on “Walden” as literature while paying insufficient attention to its author’s scientific observations.

Chris Bergeron

New London Day

Thorson’s “The Guide to Walden Pond,” produced in collaboration with the Walden Woods Project, will be released by Houghton Mifflin on March 13. In size and format, the book resembles a nature guide, but it is much more. Part armchair travelogue, part narrative journalism, it packs an incredible amount of information about Thoreau and the pond’s geological, biological and botanical environment into its 272 pages… The guide comes out at an auspicious time.

Betty Cotter

Well Read Naturalist

2017 having been the bicentennial of the birth of one of America’s most iconic nature writers – Henry David Thoreau – it’s not at all surprising that the publishing world saw a spike in books taking as their respective subject his life, his work, or simply invoking his spirit. Such is all well and good, but of all the different volumes that crossed my desk, none left me thinking that I really understood just what it was about the fabled pond that gave rise to Thoreau’s famed essays in the first place. Perhaps Robert Thorson‘s forthcoming The Guide to Walden Pond: An Exploration of the History, Nature, Landscape, and Literature of One of America’s Most Iconic Places will remedy this problem.

Johannes Riutta

Author Story

Podcast Interview.