John Aldrich Christie best captures the paradoxes and contradictions in Henry David Thoreau's treatment of travel. He characterizes Thoreau as "a man who on the one hand reiterates his disdain for travel and on the other peppers his writings with its products; a writer who urges his readers to concentrate upon a knowledge of their own local plot of ground at the same time that he makes sure in his writing that their acquaintance with the world be nothing less than global; the seemingly contented provincial who is all the while devouring the accounts of other men's furthest travels." Thoreau is best known for his works of domestic travel: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865); the shorter essays in Excursions (1863), and even Walden (1854), which can profitably be read as a voyage--after traveling a good deal in Concord Thoreau sojourns in a...