I Begin with Spring

This middle-grade illustrated nonfiction book weaves natural history around Thoreau's life and times in a field notebook format. Beginning each season with quotes from Thoreau's schoolboy essay about the changing seasons, the biographical narrative follows him through the fields and woods of Concord, the joys and challenges of growing up, his experiment with simple living on Walden Pond, and his participation in the abolition movement, self-reliance, science, and literature. The book's...
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This middle-grade illustrated nonfiction book weaves natural history around Thoreau's life and times in a field notebook format. Beginning each season with quotes from Thoreau's schoolboy essay about the changing seasons, the biographical narrative follows him through the fields and woods of Concord, the joys and challenges of growing up, his experiment with simple living on Walden Pond, and his participation in the abolition movement, self-reliance, science, and literature. The book's two organizing themes-the unfolding of Thoreau's life and the seasonal cycle beginning with spring-interact, suggesting the correspondence of human seasons with nature's. Thoreau's annual records of blooms, bird migrations, and other natural events scroll in a timeline across the page bottoms, and the back matter includes a description of Thoreau's Concord Kalendar--unfinished at his death--and what it tells us today about the science of phenology and climate change.