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University of California Press

Thoreau and the Language of Trees

by Richard Higgins (Author), Robert D. Richardson (Foreword by)
Hardcover eBook
Price: $24.95 / £21.00
Publication Date: Apr 2017
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 248
ISBN: 9780520294042
Trim Size: 6 x 8
Illustrations: 102 b/w images
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About the Book

Trees were central to Henry David Thoreau’s creativity as a writer, his work as a naturalist, his thought, and his inner life. His portraits of them were so perfect, it was as if he could see the sap flowing beneath their bark. When Thoreau wrote that the poet loves the pine tree as his own shadow in the air, he was speaking about himself. In short, he spoke their language.

In this original book, Richard Higgins explores Thoreau’s deep connections to trees: his keen perception of them, the joy they gave him, the poetry he saw in them, his philosophical view of them, and how they fed his soul. His lively essays show that trees were a thread connecting all parts of Thoreau’s being—heart, mind, and spirit. Included are one hundred excerpts from Thoreau’s writings about trees, paired with over sixty of the author’s photographs. Thoreau’s words are as vivid now as they were in 1890, when an English naturalist wrote that he was unusually able to “to preserve the flashing forest colors in unfading light.” Thoreau and the Language of Trees shows that Thoreau, with uncanny foresight, believed trees were essential to the preservation of the world.

About the Author

Richard Higgins is a former longtime staff writer for the Boston Globe, the coauthor of Portfolio Life: The New Path to Work, Purpose, and Passion after 50, and the coeditor of Taking Faith Seriously. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Century, and Smithsonian. He lives in Concord, Massachusetts.

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Table of Contents

Foreword by Robert D. Richardson
A Note on Sources
Introduction: Speaking the Language of Trees

1. AN EYE FOR TREES
Against the Sky a Tree Has Parts
2. A HEART FOR TREES
Heartwood
3. A POET’S TREES
Woodplay
4. A MIND FOR TREES
Forest Lessons
5. A SOUL FOR TREES
As High a Heaven
6. MY EMBLEM, THE PINE
Paeans to the Pine
7. KNIGHTING ELMS
Death of a Concord Kingpost
8 . A KINGDOM OF PRIMITIVE OAKS
Boxborough’s Ancient Oaks
9. TRANSFORMED BY SNOW
A World Made New
10. IN A BARQUE OF BARK
Sailing a Sea of Green

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
List of Thoreau Excerpts
Illustration Credits
Index

Reviews

"Writer and former Boston Globe reporter Richard Higgins culls a selection of Thoreau’s writings on trees from his voluminous journals. Higgins gathers a satisfying assemblage, one that showcases Thoreau’s deep reverence for the oaks and elms, pines and birches, rising into the sky in Concord. Short essays open each chapter, revealing Higgins to be a sensitive observer both of his environment and of Thoreau’s writing."
— Boston Globe
"Enchanting. . . . In lucid and elegant prose, Higgins traces Thoreau’s deep love affair with various arboreal species.”
— New York Review of Books
"A book to savour lightly and slowly, just as the subject himself might have prescribed.”
— The Irish Times
"A selection of the great Transcendentalist poet and philosopher’s meditations on trees, drawn from his two-million-word journal by writer and photographer Richard Higgins, whose beautiful black-and-white photographs complement Thoreau’s arboreal writings. . . . Thoroughly elevating."
— Brain Pickings
"Higgins’s introductory essays do a fine job contextualizing the writings and images in Concord town history and Thoreau biography. This is a handsome book that is sure to appeal to a wide audience."
— American Literary Scholarship
"Thoreau and the Language of Trees is an exquisite book physically as well as a piece of literary beauty. The silver embossed cover on green linen and the structure of the book and chapter headings in bold read as a prose poem, and the photographs with Thoreau's drawings animate the ideas that unfurl organically."—Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks

“This beautiful book brings us face to face with one of Thoreau’s true passions—his love for trees, leaf by leaf and in the whole. Richard Higgins interweaves a generous selection of Thoreau’s writings and drawings, classic Herbert Wendell Gleason photographs of trees long gone, and his own extraordinary photographs of trees in our time. To round off the feast, each chapter opens with one of Higgins’s graceful and deeply informed essays. Few books satisfy the eye, the mind, and the heart so fully as this one: one part elegy, two parts celebration, deep-rooted in the earth, and brimful with sheer joy.”—Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life
 
“In Thoreau’s era, unbroken forest stretched from New England to the Mississippi. Trees were always his best companions. He studied them with love and care, and from that knowledge built noble lessons for us all on how to live. As a writer and photographer, Richard Higgins has made of that material a brilliant, evocative book about the precious natural heritage of North America.”—William Howarth, author of The Book of Concord and Walking with Thoreau
 
“Thoreau wrote that ‘trees indeed have hearts.’ In compiling this expressive compilation of Thoreau’s writings on trees, Richard Higgins has indeed found the heart and the soul of the tree. We have much to learn about ourselves from the tree: from its strength as well as its pliancy; from its life stages from seedling to sapling to eventual death; and from its place in the community. Higgins helps us to see the forest for the trees.”—Jeffrey S. Cramer, editor of The Portable Thoreau
 
“Thoreau and the Language of Trees provides an unusually patient and devoted reading and interrogation of Thoreau’s primary works. The world as reported here is both Thoreau’s and Higgins’s; a capable and objective reporter in his own right, Higgins traverses the century and a half that nominally separates him from Thoreau with an ease that enables him to convey his subject’s lifelong interest in trees and their language to modern readers.”—Ronald A. Bosco, Distinguished Research Professor of American Literature, University at Albany, SUNY

“Thoreau and the Language of Trees elegantly fills a significant, previously unoccupied niche. The perceptive introduction and thematic chapter essays combine with quotations and sketches by Thoreau and with new and vintage photographs to form a masterfully guided tour—a tour whose visionary sylvan revelations speak to the imagination and the intellect.”—Ronald Wesley Hoag, East Carolina University