The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else *
Beha, Christopher R.
Grove Press: New York 2009
ISBN 978-0-8021-1884-4
Date finished: 2010-01-15
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Starting just past midnight on New Year's Day, Beha set out to read all fifty volumes in the Harvard Classics series, assembled around 1909. (I associate "Great Books" with the 1950s series selected by Mortimer Adler, but the Harvard Classics cover comparable ground.) It was a difficult year for Beha; a beloved aunt died, and he fell ill soon afterwards. His reading of the philosophy and literature provided some consolations; often the material in his current volume could be tied to the events going on in his life. There's not much sympathy with the scientific works in the series; most other scientific primary sources are rather dull, but surprisingly he found The Origin of Species boring. Beha also considers what happened to the educating-the-masses impulse that led to such 50-volume collections. These collections were certainly not diverse in any modern sense, but instead of assembling new collections, we seem to have given up entirely. This could potentially be a very dry story, but instead I loved it, the book turning out to be a thoughtful and engrossing memoir.