The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else Book

"Augie March used them to climb out of poverty. Malcolm X did time with them in prison. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby bantered about them in MGM's High Society. Assembled one hundred years ago by the longtime president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, the Harvard Classics are a set of great books, ranging from Plato to Dante to Darwin, that were designed to educate working-class adults in an era when only 3 percent of Americans were college graduates. Dr. Eliot's "Five-Foot Shelf" went on to sell millions of volumes and became a cultural landmark." "As a child, Chris Beha viewed the dusty shelf of Harvard Classics at his grandmother's house as little more than intellectual window dressing. Many years after her death, however, he learns that his grandmother had actually used these books to educate herself as a young woman during the Great Depression. As a twenty-something Ivy League grad with literary ambitions, Beha is startled to realize that a woman he never thought of as especially literary probably had a better grasp on intellectual history than he did." "Inspired by her example, and seeking to get his life back on track after a devastating illness, Beha decides to read the entire Five-Foot Shelf - one volume a week - over the course of the next year. As his reading progresses from St. Augustine's Confessions to Don Quixote, from Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast to works by Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Thoreau, it becomes clear that the authors of the classics are grappling with the same questions he faces: What is the purpose of life? How do we live a good life? Can the wisdom of the past help us to meet contemporary challenges? As the year goes on and Beha's ownlife is touched by tragedy, these matters take on a new urgency." Equal parts memoir and intellectual excursion, The Whole Five Feet is the story of a modern young man who spends a year in passionate engagement with the past. By living his own life while reading the best thinkers that western civilization has produced, he rediscovers the relevance of the great books and delivers a wise, hopeful, and immensely satisfying meditation on what they can teach us about life and death, and how to navigate both in the present tense.