Mystic blueberries

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” said Henry
Thoreau in Walden. He stayed hungry. Wild Fruits, the last,
unfinished work of Concord’s eco-prophet, takes us through those moments in the
New England seasons when each native fruit—huckleberry, choke cherry, wild
grape—ripens. An acute, funny and intimate book, this is also, of course,
a trip into the mystic: Thoreau’s thickets, marshes and mountains are not just
nature’s supermarket, but a place of self-realisation. Edited by Bradley Dean,
W. W. Norton, $29.95, ISBN 0393047512.