Great Literature

This is one of the most important works of American literature. it is a book I return to again and again. This reading is very good. Degas rises almost to the height of the literature itself. Do yourself a favour. Buy this audio book. Listen to it. Absorb it. Thoreau is so poorly understood and, like the Bible, people rip bits out that suit their particular agenda. But when you read these texts in their entirety, and you should, you get the full flavour of Thoreau's wit, charm and eminent sense of justice. It has been said that there have only ever been two real Christians, Christ himself and St Francis of Assisi. And of the two, Jesus doesn't quite cut the mustard. But Thoreau comes close to being the third. Not that this is a Bible bashing exercise in Christian hegemony. It is anything but that. But Thoreau's sense of humanity may well be the acme of the humanist philosophical endeavour. He was a great thinker. A revolutionary. A philosopher. A lofty American. Every great American speech written in the last 150 years has its elbows resting on the literary platter penned by Thoreau.

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