Away from Concord: The Travel Writings of Henry Thoreau

The familiar, and to an extent self-created, image of Henry Thoreau is that of a quintessentially inner-directed man. However, most of what he wrote for publication during his career was travel narrative--a popular and outer-directed genre. Travel narrative provided Thoreau a key structural principle for his prose; a vehicle for the expression of his most characteristic subjects, the engagement of consciousness with nature and society; and a controlling metaphor for his life\u27s work in letters. This study is a generic and genetic examination of Thoreau\u27s works in this mode. Thoreau\u27s apprenticeship in the traditional forms of poetry, criticism, and essay, met with frank criticism from his editors, and at Emerson\u27s suggestion he turned to writing about his interest in nature, in A Natural History of Massachusetts (1842). Excited by this subject but still struggling toward a suitable form, Thoreau essayed travel narrative as a corrective to the disjunctiveness of his early prose, and produced A Walk to Wachusett (1842) and A Winter Walk (1843). These essays reveal Thoreau\u27s dawning awareness of the suitability of travel narrative as a means of providing coherence for his writing and as a symbol of his personal quest for value in nature

The calculation of thermodynamic properties of molecules

Thermodynamic data are key in the understanding and design of chemical processes. Next to the experimental evaluation of such data, computational methods are valuable and sometimes indispensable tools in obtaining heats of formation and Gibbs free energies. The major toolboxes to obtain such quantities by computation are quantum mechanical methods and group contribution methods. Although a lot of progress was made over the last decade, for the majority of chemical species we are still quite a bit away from what is often referred to as chemical accuracy, i.e. '1 kcal mol(-1)'. Currently, for larger molecules the combination of group contribution methods with group additive values that are determined with the best available computational ab initio methods seems to be a viable alternative to obtain thermodynamic properties near chemical accuracy. New developments and full use of existing tools may lead to further improvements ( critical review, 83 references)