33 full-color photographs
Photographs by Michael Jacobson-Hardy
with excerpts from the writings of Henry David Thoreau
“This book will be a great treat for any lover of Thoreau, or any lover of the damp and dramatic New England forest.” – Bill McKibben
“My goal in assembling my photographs alongside the text of Henry David Thoreau is to help the viewer remember to look at and appreciate our natural world and to imagine walking in the footsteps of one of the forefathers of environmentalism. As Thoreau took action through his living, walking and writing, we too can live in ways that take action to protect our natural resources and environments. It is in experiencing and valuing nature that we can move toward action.” – Michael Jacobson-Hardy
From the foreword by Tom Slayton – “Henry David Thoreau famously said that he had ‘traveled widely in Concord,’ implying that there was no need for him to travel elsewhere because the universe unfolded fully right in his home town. But in fact, Thoreau traveled extensively throughout New England, and some of his travels were truly adventurous, especially considering the mid-nineteenth century world he lived in…. And so, in at least a partial sense, his travels were quests, and he recorded the details of those trips and his thoughts about them in his various books (Cape Cod, The Maine Woods, Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers) and also in his masterwork, his multi-volume journal. Michael Jacobson-Hardy’s striking photographs were taken in and near several places that Thoreau frequented. They are records of those places, and also evidence that the world of Thoreau is still very much available to us, even in civilized, developed twenty-first century New England.”
