... 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.

Gross has little feel for Emerson and Thoreau as writers, and in searching for their missing careers as activists seems to mistake what the two men were really up to. When Thoreau noted in Walden, 'As for Doing-good, that is one of the professions which are full,' he didn’t mean that he had opted instead to do bad. He meant that his true business was elsewhere.

Gross' extraordinarily comprehensive, penetrating and intimate community study demonstrates that Concord was not a sleepy, static pastoral place.

In Gross’s telling, this story is about how people in the mid-nineteenth century tried to make sense of a rapidly changing society. It’s also—though less clear from his account—a story about their refusal to make sense of their past.

... rich and revealing on every page, but it is also a doorstopper. The ideal place to read it might be a cabin in the New England woods, perhaps near a pond, and maybe over the course of a long winter. And it would help if someone brought you your meals..

Emerson and Thoreau loom large in this study, but the bulk of the book is about Concord, as a prequel to how Transcendentalism emerged there and the form it took.

... a deeply researched inquiry into the idea of individualism as expressed and grappled with by the two most famous transcendentalists.

... a rich and immersive portrait of 19th-century Concord, Mass., and the Transcendentalist movement that originated there.