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WHEN David R. Foster went to build a cabin in the deep woods of northern Vermont, he took along a literary companion: Henry David Thoreau. But reading Thoreau's journals was a strangely disillusioning experience, he recalls. Thoreau's musings on life at Walden Pond did not mesh with Mr. Foster's sense of solitude and loneliness in the "quiet and continuous forest."
By 1845, when Thoreau began living at Walden, writes Mr. Foster in Thoreau's Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape (Harvard University Press; 270 pages; $27.95), "the New England landscape was near its peak of deforestation and was being farmed and...