The Whole Five Feet
What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everthing Else
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This unique memoir of reading the classics to find strength and wisdom “makes an elegant case for literature as an everyday companion” (The New York Times Book Review).
While undergoing a series of personal and family crises, Christopher R. Beha discovered that his grandmother had used the Harvard Classics—the renowned “five foot shelf” of great world literature compiled in the early twentieth century by Charles William Eliot—to educate herself during the Great Depression. He decided to follow her example and turn to this series of great books for answers—and recounts the experience here in a smart, big-hearted, and inspirational mix of memoir and intellectual excursion that “deftly illustrates how books can save one’s life” (Helen Schulman).
“As he grapples with the death of his beloved grandmother, a debilitating bout with Lyme disease and other major and minor calamities, Beha finds that writers as diverse as Wordsworth, Pascal, Kant and Mill had been there before, and that the results of their struggles to find meaning in life could inform his own.” —The Seattle Times
“An important book [and] a sheer blast to read.” —Heidi Julavits
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At first glance, Beha's situation is enviable: the 27-year-old Princeton graduate quits his job and is welcomed back into his parents' Manhattan apartment, where he decides to dedicate himself to reading all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics Library, a "five-foot shelf" of (mostly) Western literature from Plato to Darwin. If only it were that easy: he must come to terms with the death of a beloved aunt early in the year, then is himself afflicted with a torn meniscus and a serious case of Lyme disease. With so much personal drama, the classics frequently take a back seat, and several volumes go completely unremarked. Beha spends the most time on those books that spoke most keenly to his personal circumstances; not only does he discuss John Stuart Mill's existential crisis at length, for example, he compares his own reaction to reading Wordsworth to the philosopher's. The broader conclusions Beha (now an assistant editor at Harper's) reaches about cultural values and the meaning of life are disappointingly pat; even the young memoirist concedes, "I haven't written the book I set out to write."
