Breaking Bread with the Dead
Reading the Past in Search of a Tranquil Mind
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A Spectator Book of the Year
It's fashionable to think of the writers of the past as irredeemably tarnished by prejudice. Aristotle despised women. John Milton, the great champion of free speech, wouldn't have granted it to Catholics. Edith Wharton's imaginative sympathies stopped short of her Jewish characters. But what if it is only through the works of such individuals that we can achieve a necessary perspective on the troubles of the present?
Join literary scholar Alan Jacobs for a truly nourishing feast of learning. Discover what Homer can teach us about force, what Machiavelli has to say about reading and what Charlotte Brontë reveals about race. Not all the guests are people you might want to invite into your home, but they all bring something precious to the table. In Breaking Bread with the Dead, an omnivorous reader draws us into close and sympathetic engagement with minds across the ages, from Horace to Donna Haraway.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In exploring how texts from the past can inform one's understanding of the present, Jacobs (How to Think), a humanities professor at Baylor University, tackles a promising subject matter with uneven results. Believing that wider perspectives are needed than those provided by today's world of "informational overload," he urges a productive engagement with figures and texts from the past and, in particular, "learning to know them in their difference from, as well as their likeness to, us." Jacobs presents an intriguing cast of people who did this, from Simone Weil to Frederick Douglass; in one of the book's highlights, he delves into Douglass's famous July 4th oration on why the founding fathers, though flawed by their failure to eradicate slavery, were "great in their day and generation." Jacobs's ideas sometimes feel rehashed rather than enlarged from chapter to chapter, and his language unnecessarily academic rather than simply stating that a different perspective will make a person more well-rounded, for instance, he writes that a wider "temporal bandwidth" will lead to greater "personal density" (two terms taken from Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow). Nevertheless, the ideas are stimulating, and his somewhat unsatisfactory book will still give thoughtful readers a jumping-off point for further reflection.
