Showing results for "Self Reliance" in Biographies & Memoirs

When her husband passed away after a long, trying illness, Annie Dodds was forced to sell almost everything to settle his estate. Homeless, with little money, she wondered if it might be time to pursue a decades-old dream of living a quiet, self-sufficient life alone, off-grid. One day, when her son told her he knew of an old house on 50 acres, she knew it was time.

"Self-Reliance" is an 1841 essay written by American transcendentalist philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes: the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his own instincts and ideas. It is the source of one of Emerson's most famous quotations: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

It's the 1940s. World War II. A New England farm boy is growing up during wartime. That's what Home Front: A Memoir from WWII is about. You'll share his experience - the blackouts, the rationing, the fears, the patriotism, and the unity everyone felt. As the men go off to war, you follow Douglas, our young narrator, as he grows to an obliged maturity, sharing with others, enduring the scarcity of the depression, the fear and patriotism during World War II and then the exuberance in that brief, post-war period when America felt safe and when the middle class was born.