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Maybe someday
29
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
40/100Critics
17/100Scholars
Author:
Robert A. Gross
Publisher:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Date:
November 9, 2021
Bancroft Prize-winning historian Gross returns to Concord, Mass., this time to explore the rise of transcendentalist thought that arose there among residents Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcotts and their community of friends and fellow thinkers.
What The Reviewers Say
... easily the most comprehensive work ever written about the town’s social history during the transcendentalist era.
Gross ably depicts how Concord shaped these two writers, and how they also departed from town norms. Yet his narrative of town life too often becomes an end in itself and overwhelms any relation to the transcendentalists. This is especially true with regard to politics.
The phrase 'lost in the weeds' is only an insult when it assumes one doesn’t want to be there. Gross appears to be perfectly content in them. When he and the reader reach a clearing in those weeds, he’s good at saying why they matter (in the case of pencils and other commerce, it’s the world being reshaped by capitalism and the Industrial Revolution), but those clearings can be achingly far apart.
Gross has delivered a second harvest of his career-long work. It is a measured, beautiful volume that brings warm life, accuracy, and complexity to local history, swooping between the bird’s-eye view and the tracery of many individual destinies.
