A Year with Emerson: A Daybook Book

""A chief event of life is that day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us." A Year with Emerson is a feast of 365 such days, designed to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of the "Sage of Concord." Known all over the world for his cogent, epigrammatic writing and as the "George Washington of American Literature," his work is even more delightful and enriching in bigger doses, and the daily almanac entries in A Year with Emerson take us to the heart of his ideas and philosophy. Some were written on the very day in which they appear in the book, some are speculations and musings of the season and the natural world on the date of entry, all are unfailingly wise and relevant to our modern times." As a philosopher, essayist, poet, and lecturer, Emerson's mind ranged across the universe even as he traveled the length and breadth of the United States and Europe. With him as a companion, we encounter the ideas and meet the personalities of a pantheon of geniuses, from Lincoln to John Muir, from Carlyle to Montaigne, and, of course, Emerson's own close circle of Hawthorne, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the Alcotts. With company like this, and annexed to the scope of Emerson's vision, we can read the entries as a daily inspiration and tonic or enjoy the book as the revelation of a visionary and incorruptible mind.

Library Journal

Ralph Waldo Emerson was a poet, essayist, and philosopher whose provocative thoughts transcend a variety of fields, including philosophy, literature, and politics, to name but a few, and have inspired scholars for generations. To coincide with the recent bicentenary of his birth, these two books, which differ in approach more than in objective, offer revealing glimpses into his remarkable life and career. Emerson scholar Buell (Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays) offers a nontraditional analysis of Emerson's achievements. Instead of producing a narrative biography, Buell covers "key moments of Emerson's career" and "major facets of his thought" in topics, e.g., the making of a public intellectual, religious radicalisms, and Emerson as anti-mentor, and puts these concepts into the context of the politics of the time (both in America and abroad) and of how those concepts have resonated through to the present day. As Buell puts it, his book offers a "portrayal of Emerson as a national icon who at the same time anticipates the globalizing age." Wide-ranging in scope and meticulous in attention to detail, Emerson is best suited to the specialist but still accessible to the novice. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries. By contrast, Grossman (Choosing and Changing: A Guide to Self-Reliance), a psychotherapist and medical educator, is a dabbler (much as Emerson was) and a fan not only of the substance of Emerson's writing but of his style as well. His daybook gives quotes from speeches, journals, letters, and poems-some as brief as a line-to coincide with each day of the year. Some are glossed to provide context. Topics range from slavery, Mount Monadnock, and the temporal nature of beauty to grief at the death of his first wife and his musings on the young United States. Grossman feels that "the way to approach Emerson's mind is to dip into him frequently, almost at random, to find precisely the stimulus that perhaps only he could give." This book succeeds in offering the reader such an opportunity. Recommended for public libraries. [Several useful books on Emerson have come out this spring and summer to coincide with the bicentenary, including Ronald A. Bosco and others' Emerson in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates and Laura Dassow Walls's Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth.-Ed.]-Felicity D. Walsh, Atlanta Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.