Walden Lessons for the New Millennium Author:Henry David Thoreau, Bill McKibben It takes an irreverent, original writer and thinker like Bill McKibben to reveal to a new generation of readers how intensely practical Thoreau's vision in Walden is for those of us living our lives at the cusp of the new millennium. — Recent Thoreau scholarship has concentrated on Thoreau as — prescient forest ecologist; McKibben--author of The E... more »nd of Nature and one of our best-read social and environmental critics--places him firmly back in his role as cultural and spiritual seer. McKibben identifies two questions asked by Thoreau as central to a late-twentieth-century reading of Walden: "How much is enough?" and "How do I know what I want?" Questions, McKibben reminds us, that must come to dominate the end of the twentieth century if we are to live well into the twenty-first.
McKibben's relevant and lively introduction and annotations to the 1854 edition make us see Walden as, among other things, a way to think about how we use our time, how we spend our money --and how to live essential lives.« less