"At a time when many Americans . . . are engaged in deep reflection about the meaning of the nation's history [this] is an exceptionally useful companion for those who want to do so with honesty and integrity." --Shelf Awareness From the author of How to Think and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, a literary guide to engaging with the voices of the past to stay sane in the present W. H. Auden once wrote that art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise, Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the strange and wonderful writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present--and increase what Thomas Pynchon once called our personal density. Today we are battling too much information in a society changing at lightning speed, with algorithms aimed at shaping our every thought--plus a sense that history offers no resources, only impediments to overcome or ignore. The modern solution to our problems is to surround ourselves only with what we know and what brings us instant comfort. Jacobs's answer is the opposite: to be in conversation with, and challenged by, those from the past who can tell us what we never thought we needed to know. What can Homer teach us about force? How does Frederick Douglass deal with the massive blind spots of America's Founding Fathers? And what can we learn from modern authors who engage passionately and profoundly with the past? How can Ursula K. Le Guin show us truths about Virgil's female characters that Virgil himself could never have seen? In Breaking Bread with the Dead, a gifted scholar draws us into close and sympathetic engagement with texts from across the ages, including the work of Anita Desai, Henrik Ibsen, Jean Rhys, Simone Weil, Edith Wharton, Amitav Ghosh, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Italo Calvino, and many more. By hearing the voices of the past, we can expand our consciousness, our sympathies, and our wisdom far beyond what our present moment can offer.
Jacobson-Widding reminds us, for example, that throughout sub-Saharan Africa a “funeral is a complete inversion of prescribed and normal social behavior. The hierarchical order, controlled behavior, and the prudish etiquette of normal ...
Examines the forces that prevent modern people from thinking, including distraction, social bias, and fear of rejection, and offers tips to regain a rational mental life.
Breaking Bread with the Dead: Reading the Past in Search of a Tranquil Mind
Nicholson Baker's book U and I, concerning his youthful obsession with John Updike, is a funny but also touching account of this kind of connection. Baker would cry out in pleasure after reading one of Updike's famously lapidary ...
Trick or treat—and murder—are on the menu in this first in a new culinary mystery series Life couldn't be sweeter for Tres Amigas Café chef Rita Lafitte, decorating sugar skulls and taste-testing rich, buttery pan de muerto in ...
Presents a collection of essays and book reviews covering a variety of topics in religion, philosophy, and literature.
In this book, Alan Jacobs explores the poems, novels, essays, reviews, and lectures of these five central figures, in which they presented, with great imaginative energy and force, pictures of the very different paths now set before the ...
Jacobs shows how The Book of Common Prayer--from its beginnings as a means of social and political control in the England of Henry VIII to its worldwide presence today--became a venerable work whose cadences express the heart of religious ...
In this collection of nonfiction stories, Gelman includes many of her own adventures as well as essays by writers and readers all celebrating the connections they've made through food and travel.
In superbly crafted writing that burns with intensity, award-winning author Markus Zusak, author of I Am the Messenger, has given us one of the most enduring stories of our time. “The kind of book that can be life-changing.” —The New ...