The acclaimed author of Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau traverses on foot from Manhattan to Walden Pond, retracing Thoreau's steps and unlocking the practical principles of the mystic's life in the woods. When Henry David Thoreau launched his experiment in living at Walden Pond, he began by walking beyond the narrow limits of his neighbors, simply by putting himself at a mile remove from Concord's bourgeois epicenter - and a thousand-mile remove from stasis, complacency, and conformity. Kevin Dann emulates and extends Thoreau's experiment in radical self-education. Alternating between personal anecdotes from his spring 2017 walking pilgrimage and other "traveler" encounters and episodes told by Thoreau, Dann structures his book around 12 "injunctions"--distillations of seminal stories about overcoming convention and stasis. In this essential reading for every Thoreau enthusiast, naturalist and historian Kevin Dann brings to life an essential American icon in refreshing and modern way.

The Road to Walden: 12 Life Lessons from a Sojourn to Thoreau's Cabin

Self-Help

Dann, Kevin

Personal Transformation

TarcherPerigee

To coincide with the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth in 2017, this thrilling, meticulous biography by naturalist and historian Kevin Dann fills a gap in our understanding of one modern history's most important spiritual visionaries by capturing the full arc of Thoreau's life as a mystic, spiritual seeker, and explorer in transcendental realms. This sweeping, epic biography of Henry David Thoreau sees Thoreau's world as the mystic himself saw it: filled with wonder and mystery; Native American myths and lore; wood sylphs, nature spirits, and fairies; battles between good and evil; and heroic struggles to live as a natural being in an increasingly synthetic world. Above all, Expect Great Things critically and authoritatively captures Thoreau's simultaneously wild and intellectually keen sense of the mystical, mythical, and supernatural. Other historians have skipped past or undervalued these aspects of Thoreau's life. In this groundbreaking work, historian and naturalist Kevin Dann restores Thoreau's esoteric visions and explorations to their rightful place as keystones of the man himself.

Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Now in paperback, this thrilling, meticulous biography by naturalist and historian Kevin Dann fills a gap in our understanding of Henry Thoreau, one modern history's most important spiritual visionaries by capturing the full arc of his life as a mystic, spiritual seeker, and explorer in transcendental realms. This acclaimed, epic biography of Henry David Thoreau sees Thoreau's world as the mystic himself saw it: filled with wonder and mystery; Native American myths and lore; wood sylphs, nature spirits, and fairies; battles between good and evil; and heroic struggles to live as a natural being in an increasingly synthetic world. Above all, Expect Great Things critically and authoritatively captures Thoreau's simultaneously wild and intellectually keen sense of the mystical, mythical, and supernatural. Other historians have skipped past or undervalued these aspects of Thoreau's life. In this groundbreaking work, historian and naturalist Kevin Dann restores Thoreau's esoteric visions and explorations to their rightful place as keystones of the man himself.

There is an imaginary line, a green line made of rock called serpentine, that stretches along the eastern part of North America, from Georgia to Newfoundland. This line marks the ancient “geosuture”-the joining place of the North American and Eurasian continents during the geologic past. Kevin Dann’s Traces on the Appalachians is a natural and human history of serpentine.
 Geologists have pondered the serpentine for the story it tells of earth history. The gray-green serpentine outcroppings represent traces of the earth’s mantle, transported by sea-floor spreadings and thrust into the margins of the continent. They mark the collisions of tectonic plates and the birth of mountain chains. Botanists have puzzled over the strange plants that hopscotch their way along the dotted serpentine line, unable to live on more hospitable soil.
 To archaeologists, the artifacts carved from serpentine’s companion rock, soapstone or steatite, have yielded precious clues to the human past. Native Americans used soapstone for heating-stones, bowls, pipes, and oil lamps. Vikings gratefully recognized the soft stone in the New World and fashioned it into their own household objects. Today, we put it to use in pancake griddles, wood stoves, and chemistry lab sinks. Writing in the tradition of John McPhee, Kevin Dann brilliantly interweaves new and old science with tales of human endeavor, local history, and personal exploration. Any reader with a taste for natural history will want to join his search for serpentine.

Traces on the Appalachians: A Natural History of Serpentine in Eastern North America

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

Rutgers University Press

30 Walks in New Jersey

Windswept beaches, rolling hill country, steep slopes, broad green river valleys, beaver ponds, dense cedar swamps, spectacular water falls, iron forges, and tranquil villages are all part of New Jersey's landscape.There is no better way to appreciate and understand this landscape than to walk through it. For years, hikers have treasured Kevin Dann's 25 Walks in New Jersey. Now Kevin Dann and Gordon Miller expanded that classic guide. In addition to revising and updating the original twenty-five walks, they have included five new walks in Salem, Bridgeton, Burlington, Allaire State Park, and Moore's Beach. The thirty walks range from two-hour jaunts over level terrain to more taxing full-day hikes. Walks in the Kittatiny Ridge, the Highlands, the Piedmont, the Delaware River Valley, the Pinelands, Cape May, along the Atlantic Coast, and communities of historical interest are all included. For each trip, the authors guide the walker along the way, pointing out distinctive rock formations, plant communities, and wildlife as well as noting the ways human activity has shaped the landscape. They provide clear maps to the route, directions, and hours of operation.

Sports & Outdoors

In recent years scholars have begun to question the cultural values underlying our view of Nature. Kevin Dann contributes to this debate by juxtaposing two radically different “Arcadian” experiments founded by Manhattanites seeking cultural renewal through contact with the natural world. Dann focuses first on initiatives carried out by the American Museum of Natural History and the Eugenics Record Office from 1910 to 1940 within Harriman State Park in the Ramapo Mountains. He argues that these diverse expressions of the early “back-to-nature” movement are united by their biological materialism, or “Naturalism,” which became integral to the popular culture of educated metropolitan Americans in the early twentieth century.
He then compares this activity to the contemporary efforts at nearby Threefold Farm, where anthroposophists--followers of Rudolf Steiner's“spiritual science”--developed a program of natural scientific research and education that directly opposed Darwinian explanations of natural history, social Darwinian views of human society, and reductionist scientific methods. By challenging scientific “fact” with spiritual scientific descriptions of supersensible phenomena, the Threefold Farm initiative offered Americans a new gospel of nature.

Across the Great Border Fault: The Naturalist Myth in America

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Enchanted New York: A Journey along Broadway through Manhattan's Magical Past

Review\n"There are no ancient monuments to mark New York City’s magical history; in their place, Dann’s historical guide chronicles the city’s lesser-known magical past." ― Foreword Reviews\n"Enchanted New York is full of wonderful anecdotes, and I enjoyed seeing how many of these addresses were still extant. It’s a nice mental ramble in these claustrophobic times." ― Religion Dispatches\n"It’s a place where poetry grows of chance encounters among strangers below the piers conjuring an alchemy of ideas, where we imagine other worlds; rituals invoke spirits, the dead dance with the living, and the faeries lead us into a blurry world in between. Here pieces of green find inspiration in the cracks in the sidewalk, crawling up from unknown worlds, eternal returns of the repressed. Cycling through these streets, one occasionally stumbles upon urbanist flaneur Kevin Dann, disappearing and reappearing on chance occasions; his Enchanted New York rightfully reminds us “New York City since the American Revolution has been a place where, at each step of its prodigious biography, both witting and unwitting actors have engaged in magic, often with enormous historical consequences rippling out far beyond Manhattan’s shores.” An important and abundant journey through a secret history of a distinct urban space informed by witches and dreams, faerie magic and a creative clash between a new colossus and Moloch. At a time of plague, when the poor are sleeping in the streets, and a cavalcade of bodies are marching for something better, read Enchanted New York and reimagine the city." -- Benjamin Heim Shepard, author of Illuminations on Market Street\n"Packed with fascinating details and arresting insights, Enchanted New York is a page-turner that illuminates forgotten corners of our cultural past." -- Jackson Lears, author of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920\n"For over a decade Kevin Dann has been cycling friends, family, and clients over the streets of Manhattan to reveal delicious and tragic histories of the tension between the humane desire to understand the supra-sensible universe and the soul-crushing materialism that inundates Gotham. A more talented, erudite, and soulful guide does not exist. Enchanted New York renders those voyages into a book like a butterfly unfurling its wings as it emerges from the chrysalis shaped island." -- Gary Kroll, State University of New York, Plattsburgh\nA fantastical field guide to the hidden history of New York's magical past\nManhattan has a pervasive quality of glamour―a heightened sense of personality generated by a place whose cinematic, literary, and commercial celebrity lends an aura of the fantastic to even its most commonplace locales. Enchanted New York chronicles an alternate history of this magical isle. It offers a tour along Broadway, focusing on times and places that illuminate a forgotten and sometimes hidden history of New York through site-specific stories of wizards, illuminati, fortune tellers, magicians, and more.\nProgressing up New York’s central thoroughfare, this guidebook to magical Manhattan offers a history you won’t find in your Lonely Planet or Fodor’s guide, tracing the arc of American technological alchemies―from Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton to the Manhattan Project―to Mesmeric physicians, to wonder–working Madame Blavatsky, and seers Helena Roerich and Alice Bailey. Harry Houdini appears and disappears, as the world’s premier stage magician’s feats of prestidigitation fade away to reveal a much more mysterious―and meaningful―marquee of magic.\nUnlike old-world cities, New York has no ancient monuments to mark its magical adolescence. There is no local memory embedded in the landscape of celebrated witches, warlocks, gods, or goddesses―no myths of magical metamorphoses. As we follow Kevin Dann in geographical and chronological progression up Broadway from Battery Park to Inwood, each chapter provides a surprising picture of a

History

Americas

Washington Mews Books/NYU Press

A fantastical field guide to the hidden history of New York's magical past Manhattan has a pervasive quality of glamour--a heightened sense of personality generated by a place whose cinematic, literary, and commercial celebrity lends an aura of the fantastic to even its most commonplace locales. Enchanted New York chronicles an alternate history of this magical isle. It offers a tour along Broadway, focusing on times and places that illuminate a forgotten and sometimes hidden history of New York through site-specific stories of wizards, illuminati, fortune tellers, magicians, and more. Progressing up New York's central thoroughfare, this guidebook to magical Manhattan offers a history you won't find in your Lonely Planet or Fodor's guide, tracing the arc of American technological alchemies--from Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton to the Manhattan Project--to Mesmeric physicians, to wonder-working Madame Blavatsky, and seers Helena Roerich and Alice Bailey. Harry Houdini appears and disappears, as the world's premier stage magician's feats of prestidigitation fade away to reveal a much more mysterious--and meaningful--marquee of magic. Unlike old-world cities, New York has no ancient monuments to mark its magical adolescence. There is no local memory embedded in the landscape of celebrated witches, warlocks, gods, or goddesses--no myths of magical metamorphoses. As we follow Kevin Dann in geographical and chronological progression up Broadway from Battery Park to Inwood, each chapter provides a surprising picture of a city whose ever-changing fortunes have always been founded on magical activity.

In The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, it is said: Katun 11 Ahau is set upon the mat, set upon the throne, when their ruler is set up.... The heavenly fan, the heavenly wreath and the heavenly bouquet shall descend. The drum and rattle of the lord of 11 Ahau shall resound, when flint knives are set into his mantle.... Ahau 11 is the beginning of the count, because this was the katun when the foreigners arrived. They came from the east when they arrived. Then Christianity also began. The fulfillment of its prophecy is [ascribed] to the east.... This is a record of the things which they did. After it had all passed, they told of it in their [own] words, but its meaning is not plain. Despite the explosion of books, videos and TV shows that claim to penetrate the mystery of "2012"—the numerical shorthand for the completion on December 21, 2012, of the thirteenth B'ak'tun cycle in the Long Count of the Maya calendar—consensus about its meaning seems to remain elusive. The discussion about the significance of 2012 falls generally into two distinct camps: "New Age" authors who see this date as marking the advent of an imminent, universally accelerated psychic/spiritual evolution and professional astronomers and ethnologists who generally discount such metaphysical claims. Christ and the Maya Calendar approaches the significance of 2012 by spiritually penetrating phenomena of today. Drawing on the book of Revelation—which provides an archetype for understanding spiritual history, as well as Rudolf Steiner's Apocalyptic indications—a completely new context for grasping the end date of the Maya calendar emerges. In a November 1919 lecture, Steiner made a stunning remark: "Ahriman skilfully prepares his goal beforehand...[and] will find an important instrument for preparing his incarnation. His incarnation is undoubtedly coming, and this lack of insight will enable him to prepare it triumphantly." The subtitle of this book—"2012 and the Coming of the Antichrist"—refers to this coming incarnation of Ahriman. In fact, Steiner narrowed the timeline for Ahriman's incarnation, saying it would come "before only a part of the third millennium has run its course." Just after Christmas 1919, Steiner revealed more about the impending incarnation of Ahriman, saying almost offhandedly that Ahriman's name might be "John William Smith." With this remark, he clearly pointed to the incarnation occurring in the English-speaking West, while other remarks made it is certain Steiner meant that the incarnation would take place in America. In addition to penetrating the spiritual background of our time in relation to the coming of the Antichrist (the incarnation of Ahriman), the authors explore the significance of the Mexican mysteries and present a wealth of new research with the intention of helping the reader to navigate the Apocalyptic scenario currently shaping up, with the global financial crisis as one important expression. Most important, the authors refer to the Second Coming of Christ as the true event of our time; the incarnation of Satan/Ahriman is its shadow. The authors also show the significance of Divine Sophia as the antidote to negative consequences of Ahriman's incarnation. Finally, as a positive manifestation of the world of spirit in our time, the book discusses the significance of the young anthroposophist, Judith von Halle, who since Easter 2004 has born the stigmata, the visible signs of the wounds of Christ. A Note on the Title The word Antichrist is used in the title and throughout this book, and there are at least two ways in which this word may be understood. The more general use of the word is found in the Bible and in Christian tradition, in which the Antichrist is understood to be the human being who bears the incarnated Satan (also called "Ahriman" in Persian tradition and, in Revelation 13 in the Bible, "The Beast"). This is how the word Antichrist is used in this book. However, this general meaning should be distinguished from another, more specialized use of the word, as found in the spiritual science of Anthroposophy, which often uses the word Antichrist to designate the Sun Demon, known as Sorath in the Hebrew tradition, referred to as the "Beast whose number is 666," and as "the two-horned Beast" in Revelation 13. In this connection, Rudolf Steiner refers to "the False Prophet who represents the teachings of The Beast." The authors of this book discuss the significance of Sorath in chapters 7 and 8. Authors' Note Rudolf Steiner's large body of spiritual research has paved the way for further research encompassing thousands of volumes and numerous projects and social endeavors around the world. This book focuses upon Steiner's indications about the return of Christ, on the one hand, and the coming of the Antichrist, on the other hand. Both events, according to Steiner, are taking place, or will take place, in our time. Our endeavor is to provide a context in which the reader can find help to be able to grasp the larger picture as to the nature of the time in which we live. The purpose of the book is to draw attention to Christ's return in the realm of life forces known as the etheric, as well as to the impending physical incarnation of Ahriman as the Antichrist. The book is carefully written in the spirit of the age of the clear, critical consciousness of modern humanity to allow people to draw their own conclusions. Thus, it is not a matter of pointing the finger and pronouncing slogan-like statements. Rather, it is a matter of providing a context for the reader to arrive at a deeper grasp of what is taking place in the world at the present time, which can be attained only by way of hard study and the honest endeavor to attain a higher level of cognition. The main point is that the coming of the Antichrist is actually the shadow side of the much greater event of Christ's coming in the etheric realm, whereby Divine Sophia is actively working to help humanity to become aware of this greatest event of our time. Central to Rudolf Steiner's impulse is the development of intuitive faculties, which he named Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. This means that, when research is presented, people—through the exercise of their intuitive faculties—come to their own cognition of the truth and do not depend simply upon what is said by those presenting the research. The goal is—and must be—to arrive at truth for oneself, not based upon anyone else's statements. Although, of course, the statements of others can be taken as a starting point for arriving at the truth. However, cognition of the truth depends upon the development of intuitive faculties going beyond intellectual speculation. Since the publication of this book, various pronouncements—many of a speculative nature—have been made concerning the content of the book. The authors fully support the expression of freedom of thought and freedom of speech underlying statements about the book but obviously cannot be held responsible for the conclusions drawn by others from the research presented in this book. Their concern is truth—in the spirit of the words: "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32). In relation to the Antichrist, called the Beast in chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation, his way (Revelation 13) is prepared by the Prophet of the Beast. Nowhere in this book are statements made identifying specific individuals as the Beast (Antichrist) or as the Prophet of the Beast. Yet, in this age of the Internet, all kinds of pro

Christ and the Maya Calendar: 2012 and the Coming of the Antichrist

Religion & Spirituality

Christian Books & Bibles

Lindisfarne Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dann, Kevin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dann, Kevin

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dann, Kevin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Road to Walden: 12 Life Lessons from a Sojourn to Thoreau's Cabin

Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau

Expect Great Things: The Life and Search of Henry David Thoreau

Traces on the Appalachians: A Natural History of Serpentine in Eastern North America

30 Walks in New Jersey

30 Walks in New Jersey

Across the Great Border Fault: The Naturalist Myth in America

Enchanted New York: A Journey along Broadway through Manhattan's Magical Past

Enchanted New York: A Journey along Broadway through Manhattan's Magical Past

Christ and the Maya Calendar: 2012 and the Coming of the Antichrist