THOREAU

Milton Meltzer, who edited A Thoreau Profile (see p. 1023, 1962) with Walter Harding, here presents Thoreau in his own words as a social thinker. There are more than 100 excerpts from his journals and letters from 1837 to 1859. Reprinted in full are: "Paradise (To Be) Regained", comments on Etzler's Utopia ("a transcendantalism in mechanics"), Chapter Two of Walden, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" ("Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!"); "Slavery in Massachusetts", printed in the New York Tribune in 1854; "A Plea for Captain John Brown" in 1859 and "The Last Days of John Brown" in 1860; and "Life Without Principle", printed in 1863, seventeen months after Thoreau's death, in the Atlantic Monthly ("Read not the Times. Read The Eternities."). There are words for abolitionist Rogers; for Wendell Phillips and Walt Whitman. Aside from selection, the editor contributes a minimum of orientation. The result is a collection which for the alert reader gives Thoreau's views on the role of the government and the governed (the seeds to Gandhi's passive resistance are here), on religion, on business and urban life, on the state and needs of the individual in society. f reference value, with potential interest for students of politics everywhere.