WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:42 — 44.7MB)
(Original air date: July 30, 2019)
Forget the haters – they have not read deliberately nor with imagination, only as partisans.
You could do much worse than spend many hours reading and studying just two of Thoreau’s great essays, “Civil Disobedience” and “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” The first, influential for a non-violent response to tyranny, the second, recognizing the necessity of violence in response to the quotidian and incessant violence of institutions in capitalist America.
Laura Dassow Walls will tell us about how a man, in seeking the best way to be fully alive, gave his life to his neighbors, and the world. In her biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Walls shows us a man deeply engaged with friends, relatives and neighbors, a man thoroughly of his time and place, but in a way that still finds him out ahead of us. In every way we need Henry Thoreau’s work to ring in our ears. We need to front life deliberately and not come to the end of our days knowing that we have not lived.
GUEST
Laura Dassow Walls is William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America and Henry David Thoreau: A Life, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
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MUSIC
“Pithecanthropus Erectus” by Charles Mingus
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
