{"product_id":"book-i249","title":"Glad to the Brink of Fear","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAn engaging reassessment of the celebrated essayist and his relevance to contemporary readers\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp style=\"text-align: start\"\u003eMore than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee shrewdness.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp style=\"text-align: start\"\u003eThis Emerson is a rebel. He is also a lover, a friend, a husband, and a father. Having declared his great topic to be \"the infinitude of the private man,\" he is nonetheless an intensely social being who develops Transcendentalism in the company of Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Theodore Parker. And although he resists political activism early on-hoping instead for a revolution in consciousness-the burning issue of slavery ultimately transforms him from cloistered metaphysician to fiery abolitionist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp style=\"text-align: start\"\u003eDrawing on telling episodes from Emerson's life alongside landmark essays like \"Self-Reliance,\" \"Experience,\" and \"Circles,\" \u003cem\u003eGlad to the Brink of Fear\u003c\/em\u003e reveals how Emerson shares our preoccupations with fate and freedom, race and inequality, love and grief. It shows, too, how his desire to see the world afresh, rather than accepting the consensus view, is a lesson that never grows old.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp style=\"text-align: start\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\"Of all of Emerson's biographers, James Marcus is the first to make the man and his thought come alive in the present. His Emerson is a marvel-a skeptic and an apostle, a creature of flawed feelings and noble ideals, a lover, a mourner, a wit, and a visionary. How lucky we are to encounter him through Marcus's wonderfully exact and affable prose.\"\u003c\/em\u003e-\u003cstrong\u003eMerve Emre\u003c\/strong\u003e, Wesleyan University, contributing writer at \u003cem\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Recorded Books, Inc.","offers":[{"title":"Audiobook","offer_id":49351296876848,"sku":"BDi249","price":25.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Audio CD","offer_id":49351296909616,"sku":"ZEi249","price":49.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Audio MP3-CD","offer_id":49351296975152,"sku":"ZMi249","price":45.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0879\/2784\/9264\/files\/i249-cover.jpg?v=1761197566","url":"https:\/\/downpour.com\/products\/book-i249","provider":"Downpour","version":"1.0","type":"link"}