Book Shelf. - Review - book review

National Review, Sept 11, 2000 by Mike Potemra

The humanities are not just for the professoriate: This is the perspective of two impressive new books by prominent intellectuals.

Literary critic Harold Bloom's 1998 book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human helped create something of a Shakespeare moment in the mass culture. His new book, How to Read and Why (Scribner, 283 pp., $25), builds on that surprising popular success by trying to explain, to a broad audience, what literature is trying to do. While Bloom often returns to Shakespeare, his subject here is the entire spectrum of Western imaginative literature.

The book offers excellent advice on a general level. For example, Bloom urges us "not to refuse the pleasures of identification with favorite characters, any more than the authors have been able to resist such pleasures." (One of my favorite writers, Vladimir Nabokov, discouraged this particular indulgence.) But the book can be read most profitably as a series of short introductions to key novels, plays, and poems. Bloom provides pithy, memorable distillations of his lifetime of study: Crime and Punishment is "dreadfully powerful but somewhat pernicious, almost as though it were a Macbeth composed by Macbeth himself"; "Kafka and Borges do not give you dirges for the unlived life."

Fifty years ago, Mortimer Adler was working on a similar project of popularizing high culture, the Britannica series of Great Books of the Western World. His new book, How to Think About the Great Ideas (Open Court, 530 pp., $24.95), is an artifact of that era: a transcription of 52 television shows he did in 1953-54. Adler's approach was controversial at the time, condemned by some as middlebrow-but the new book demonstrates the value, indeed the necessity, of Adler's project.

He begins with the insight that philosophical thought is an activity to which all people have a proclivity, and that the words denoting the Great Ideas are not the jargon of a specialized science but the words of everyday speech. His task is to take words such as truth, beauty, justice, and love, and deepen his audience's understanding of them without recourse to a technical vocabulary. That he succeeds in this, for over 500 pages, is a tribute both to his devotion and to the possibilities of popularization. I also strongly recommend Adler's How to Read a Book (Simon & Schuster, 426 pp., $14), written with Charles Van Doren, and Bloom's The Western Canon (Riverhead, 546 pp., $15) as excellent companions to reading one's way through our cultural patrimony.