SAN FRANCISCO, CA (MMD Newswire) June 15, 209 -- The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from the Journals of Henry David Thoreau, edited by David Gross, uses excerpts from Thoreau's journals to explore his views on civil disobedience, conscience, law, government, slavery, war and economics.
Throughout his life, Henry David Thoreau occasionally used his 47 journals to express his often revolutionary views on politics and human nature, later toning down his more radical ideas for his published pieces, such as Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts and Life Without Principle. David Gross has now collected Thoreau's uncensored opinions from his journals in his new book, The Price of Freedom.
Gross organized the book with an index and footnotes in order to put Thoreau's writing in a historical context and to show how the journal entries relate to Thoreau's published work. Written to coincide with the 150th anniversary of abolitionist John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, which Thoreau wrote about extensively in his journals, The Price of Freedom is intended to uncover the full range of Thoreau's thinking about political philosophy, including those passages that Dr. Sandra Harbert Petrulionis describes as "blasphemous, revolutionary or, at best, politically incautious" in her article "Editorial Savoir Faire: Thoreau Transforms His Journal into ‘Slavery in Massachusetts.'"
"The journal excerpts collected here show Thoreau to be uncompromising in his disgust with the State, with church authority, with the news media and with slavery and those who would accommodate it," explains Gross. "But they also show a Thoreau who was eager to defend wilderness against ‘improvement,' who weighed the curiosity he could satisfy through vivisection against the qualms he felt about engaging in it and who went from thinking of soldiers as almost mythological heroes to thinking of them as ‘powder monkeys' who had mortgaged their consciences to no good end."
For more information or to request a free review copy, members of the press can contact the author at dave@sniggle.net. The Price of Freedom: Political philosophy from the journals of Henry David Thoreau is available for sale online at Amazon.com and other channels.
About the Author
David Gross is a graduate of California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and has edited and published books on the history of American Quaker war tax resistance as well as other subjects. Inspired by Thoreau, he refuses to pay taxes that he feels would make him complicit in the government's policies and is on the administrative committee of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.
MEDIA CONTACT
David Gross
Email: dave@sniggle.net
Phone: 415-666-3632
Website: http://sniggle.net/Experiment
REVIEW COPIES AND INTERVIEWS AVAILABLE
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