About the book, from the publisher:
A rediscovery of Thoreau’s interactions with everyday objects and how they shaped his thought.Learn more about Mindprints at the University of Chicago Press website.
Though we may associate Henry David Thoreau with ascetic renunciation, he accumulated a variety of tools, art, and natural specimens throughout his life as a homebuilder, surveyor, and collector. In some of these objects, particularly Indigenous artifacts, Thoreau perceived the presence of their original makers, and he called such objects “mindprints.” Thoreau believed that these collections could teach him how his experience, his world, fit into the wider, more diverse (even incoherent) assemblage of other worlds created and re-created by other beings every day. In this book, Ivan Gaskell explores how a profound environmental aesthetics developed from this insight and shaped Thoreau’s broader thought.
The Page 99 Test: Mindprints.
--Marshal Zeringue
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