| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lance Newman. Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005. Pp. xv, 255. $65.00.
This is a well-written, provocative book that is stronger in its parts than as a whole. Lance Newman sees his work as a contribution to the emerging field of ecocriticism, which bills itself as a revisionist theoretical school and a nascent political movement. But Newman's study may be appreciated on more modest terms, as an attempt to ground Henry David Thoreau and Transcendentalism in broader social, political, and scientific contexts of the antebellum period. In this light, the book belongs on a shelf with noteworthy studies by authors such as Anne C. Rose and Laura Dassow Walls.	1
The title of the book is actually somewhat misleading; Thoreau is the primary focus of only five of seventeen chapters. Another eight individual chapters explore New England's labor turmoil as well as the response of individual Transcendentalists and the movement in general. The remaining four chapters, in addition to a rather partisan foreword, serve as theoretical bookends. Manifestly, the book as a whole suffers somewhat from a lack of synthesis and integration. Newman would have been better advised to compress and consolidate many of the eight background chapters with those on Thoreau (a higher degree of synthesis that he achieved in an article in American Literature [September 2003] that includes material from some of these chapters). Rather than sustaining this tighter, more well-wrought approach, Newman instead chose to engage in a more segmented "dialectical writing," but the result falls short of the "holistic, 'totalizing'" finished product that he had hoped for (p. 24).	. . .

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