'The essays are consistently sharp, smart, evenhanded, jargon free, and accessible, their brevity (all are 10–11 pages length) lending each the quality of a tantalizing entrée into an aspect of Thoreau's writing and culture. … The collection demonstrates (in brief) the scores of fascinating ways that contemporary criticism sees and reads Thoreau. … Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.' G. D. MacDonald, CHOICE
'The genre more or less demands that the contributor's aim be to connect Thoreau with some extracted slice of the ambient culture, leading to a stackable set of conjoined or binary analyses: Thoreau and Religion, Thoreau and Technology, Thoreau and Native America, and so forth, an arrangement more exactly developed in the Finley collection.' Albert J. Von Frank, Modern Intellectual History