A week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers
By: Henry David Thoreau ; with an introduction and notes by H. Daniel Peck.
Contributors: Peck, H. Daniel.
Series: Penguin classics
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1998
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 335
Subjects: Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 -- Travel -- Massachusetts -- Concord River; Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 -- Travel -- Merrimack River (N.H. and Mass.); Concord River (Mass.) -- Description and travel; Merrimack River (N.H. and Mass.) -- Description and travel
Description: Thoreau's account of the 1839 river voyage he made with his brother is both a compelling travel narrative and a meditation on the meanings of time, history, and loss.

Thoreau's Week shares many themes with his classic Walden: self-renewal in nature, the spiritual meanings of perception, and the shallowness of contemporary culture, religion, and politics. But while Walden portrays a pastoral life essentially impervious to time, A Week dramatizes change and the inevitability of loss. The loss that implicitly informs the narrative, deepening its elegiac treatment of New England's past, is the tragic death of Thoreau's brother, John, only three years after the journey.

Yet, through the classic structure of departure and return, Thoreau imaginatively redeems both his personal and historical losses, as he voyages upon the stream of time. In A Week, descriptions of natural phenomena, the rural landscape, and local characters are interwoven with reflections on literature and philosophy, the Native American and Puritan histories of New England, Eastern sacred writings, the imperfections of Christianity, and many other subjects.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. xxiii-xxvi).