Christopher R. Beha, out of a job and recovering from cancer, decides to read the Harvard Classics. Charles Eliot, the former president of Harvard University, assembled 51 volumes of “classics” that sold briskly a hundred years ago. The implication was that if you read all 51 volumes, you’d have the equivalent of a Harvard education. From Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography to Beowulf and The Song of Roland and everything in between, the Harvard Classics established itself as the literary canon of its day. In The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else we see the Harvard Classics through the prism of Beha’s life of family and health crises. It takes Beha a year to read all 51 volumes and much happens to him in that year. I find books like this irresistible. GRADE: B+
DArn you, George, you made me order another book!
I do what I can to help the economy, Jeff.
Me, too. I loved the Denby one even though I can do without him.
You’re right, Patti, the David Denby GREAT BOOKS volume started this trend of revisiting the classics. Denby later got sucked into online porno and day-trading which he reveals in AMERICAN SUCKER.