WALDEN

Thoreau's famous account of his two years at Walden Pond is more a discourse on humanity than a ramble through the woods. It's dense, tightly reasoned and magically poetic, and no audio version will be good "road-reading" in expressway traffic. Thoreau doesn't tolerate interference. This production, while perfect in every other respect, doesn't take into account this difficulty. Gardner is a fine reader of fiction, but his pace here is hurried. He has great sensitivity for Thoreau's spleen, irony and other splashes of color, but no sympathy for the plight of his benighted listeners struggling to keep pace. So, to paraphrase Orwell's Boxer, "Seven cassettes good, eight cassettes better." P.E.F. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 95]