Book: Woodsburner by John Pipkin

Woodsburner is a novel about the fire that Henry David Thoreau accidentally set near Concord in the spring of 1844. It burned 300 acres, threatening Concord before the townsmen successfully created effective firebreaks and stopped the advance. This is wonderfully written and follows several characters other than David Henry, as he was known before he changed his name to Henry David. There is Emma, an Irish immigrant married to a brutish lout; Oddmund, a Swedish immigrant whose family perished when he was a young boy; Eliot Calvert, a pompous bookseller who dreams of writing a successful play; and Caleb, a stern, half-crazy religious man. As the fire progresses, their stories are told, and the the day-to-day culture of that time comes to life.

As Thoreau ruminates on his carelessness and feels tremendous remorse for the burned-over land, he muses that "Man's inability to conceive of the world's limits does not render the world limitless...The vast wilderness that covered the shores of the New World seemed impenetrable until they built a city. The hills and rivers of Boston seemed immovable until they leveled and filled them. Concord was an outpost in the wilderness until it grew to devour its landscape..." Thoreau decides to remove himself to Walden as some sort of atonement..to live simply, to begin writing, "to make a book from the notes and sketches he collected with his brother during their trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers."

And later this afternoon, I was finishing skimming through John McPhee's latest book: The Silk Parachute. I didn't read all the chapters, not particularly being captivated by golf and lacrosse, but I was interested in a chapter titled "Checkpoints," which are his notes on fact-checkers, especially at The New Yorker. And suddenly, this sentence popped up: "On the Merrimack River in Merrimack, New Hampshire, is a Budweiser brewery [the site of which] John and Henry Thoreau passed....in their homemade skiff on the journey that resulted in Henry's first book." Of all the allusions I could have read, this one to something I had read earlier the same day, seems quite striking to me.

So, YES on Woodsburner and MAYBE on Silk Parachute. There is enough in McPhee's book to like, if one likes his writing.