When Henry David Thoreau launched his experiment in living at Walden Pond, he began by walking beyond the narrow limits of his neighbors, putting himself at a mile remove from Concord's bourgeois epicenter—and further still from any need for conformity. Here the author of Expect Great Things emulates and extends Thoreau's experiment in radical self-education. Alternating between personal anecdotes from his 235-mile walking pilgrimage from Manhattan to Concord and distillations from Thoreau's works, Kevin Dann carefully considers why Walden still matters, and underscores its message of why we must not surrender to convention and stasis.