Outsider : My Boyhood with Thoreau
by Lawrence Millman
Illustrated by Geoff Halverson
Publication Date: March 26, 2024 | LCCN: 2024902073
Paperback: $12.95 USD | ISBN 978-1-58775-046-5
E-Book: $9.99 USD | ISBN 978-1-58775-051-9
About the Book | About the Author | Events | Praise
About the Book
Outsider: My Boyhood with Thoreau is a memoir told in vignettes by the mycologist and author Lawrence Millman. Early on, Millman found in Thoreau a kindred spirit, far outside of the mainstream social, sporting, and educational interests he was expected to be cultivating. And like Thoreau, he would rather be out-of-doors — where he could socialize with mushrooms, insects, or earthworms — than stuck in any indoor locale.
About the Author
Writer, ethnographer, mycologist Lawrence Millman has made over forty trips and expeditions to the Arctic and Subarctic. His twenty-seven books include such titles as Last Places, Northern Latitudes, A Kayak Full of Ghosts, Our Like Will Not Be There Again, Hiking to Siberia, Lost in the Arctic, At the End of the World, The Book of Origins, Fungipedia, The Last Speaker of Bear, Foraging with Jeeves, and the Coyote Arts title Goodbye, Ice. He has written for Smithsonian, National Geographic, Outside, Atlantic Monthly, and The Sunday Times (London). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Praise
Outsider won the 2024 New Mexico Book Association’s Southwest Book Design and Production Award in Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir!
Henry David, I think, would have wanted you to carry this in your hip pocket, to be mulled over in small bites while walking.
— Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and editor of American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
If you read Larry Millman (and the gods help you if you don’t!), then you already know he is an odd fellow. This sweet and sharp beauty of a bagatelle lets us in on how he got that way, with a good many grins and groans along the way. And it leaves us feeling lucky that Larry, like Henry, has followed his own nose, and no one else’s.
— Robert Michael Pyle, author of Children of the Night
and The Thunder Tree
Lawrence Millman is my kind of guy–kind of like a cross between Henry David Thoreau and a badger (the Eurasian badger, as the American badger is sometimes considered ill-tempered). Like Larry, I am always happiest among the salamanders and caterpillars, but reading Larry’s vivid, honest, often hilarious accounts of how nature shaped his quirky, abundant life makes for excellent company. Everyone who loves animals and nature will love this.
— Sy Montgomery, author of Of Time and Turtles: Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell
What could be better than a pairing of Lawrence Millman and Henry David Thoreau? Outsider is a piece to cherish and a reminder that we are never alone as long as words live on the printed page.
— David Breithaupt, contributor LA Review of Books
In a culture gone insane, misfits are our best or perhaps only hope. Two meet in Millman’s kaleidoscopic mini-memoir of boyhood days. The mind on display—like Thoreau’s—thrills to the tune of nature, drawn by the generally neglected or even despised: slugs, mushrooms, millipedes, earthworms…. Clear-eyed, wild as youth itself, with its hands in the dirt and teeming with life, Outsider earns a place on the shelf next to that transcendentalist’s essay “Walking.”
— Michael Engelhard, author of Arctic Traverse
This book is small in size but huge in spirit. Read it, revel in it, then make your way outside and get some dirt on your clothes.
— Gregory McNamee, author of Gila: The Life and Death of an American River
Lawrence Millman is that rarest of creatures — a nature writer with a sense of humor. He would have kept his buddy Henry David Thoreau in stitches.
— Jim Christy, author of The Rough Road to the North and Traveling Light
Lawrence Millman’s idle reflections on a childhood spent with Henry David Thoreau are at once irreverent, enlightening, and entertaining. Thoreau must be clawing at the lid of his coffin to join in on the fun.
— David O. Born, author of Hypothermia
★★★★★ How to see the world
— James M. Dorsey, on Amazon
Lawrence Millman has always preferred nature to people and his writings are a beautiful explanation of why. He introduces the natural world through words like a painter creates a landscape, and after reading his work, I often wonder how many people put down their I phones, at least for a while. He is a voice crying in the wilderness that technology is not always better. My Boyhood with Thoreau, made me take my shoes off, walk through tall grass, and smile at the sunshine. May this unique author continue to interpret the natural world for all of us.