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“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” said Henry
Thoreau in Walden. He stayed hungry. Wild Fruits, the last,
unfinished work of Concord’s eco-prophet, takes us through those moments in the
New England seasons when each native fruit—huckleberry, choke cherry, wild
grape—ripens. An acute, funny and intimate book, this is also, of course,
a trip into the mystic: Thoreau’s thickets, marshes and mountains are not just
nature’s supermarket, but a place of self-realisation. Edited by Bradley Dean,
W. W. Norton, $29.95, ISBN 0393047512.