Review: A new PBS documentary reveals why Henry David Thoreau's radicalism resonates today

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Henry David Thoreau is one of those figures whose name one may know but whose writing often boils down in the mind to titles of works never read — including “Walden” and “Civil Disobedience.” Some lines may be familiar: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”; “Our life is frittered away by detail ...simplify, simplify!” (The latter I first heard quoted by a character played by Dick Van Dyke in the movie “What a Way to Go!”) Thoreau coined the phrase “different drummer,” which links him directly to Mike Nesmith of the Monkees, whose song “Different Drum” became a hit for Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys in 1967.At the same time, since Thoreau’s death in 1862 at age 44, his writing has traveled far, wide and long, influencing many who did happen to read it, including Malcolm X, the Rev.

Martin Luther King Jr.and Mahatma Gandhi.

His thoughts on how to live in the world remain inspiring, even as his observations on man’s inhumanity to man and nature have been, unfortunately and increasingly, relevant in the nearly two centuries since his works were published.“The winds and the waves are not enough for him; he must needs ransack the bowels of the earth that he may make for himself a highway of iron over its surface” is as true as it ever was.An observation like, “Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land.

There is no other land; there is no other life but this,” could easily apply to those who quixotically believe the remedy for a trashed Earth is to live on Mars.“A government which deliberately enacts injustice and persists in it will at length ever become the laughingstock of the world … I say break the law; let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine,” foreshadows our current state of federal domestic terrorism and grassroots resistance.

“Who can be serene in a country wh...