Alan Jacobs's Breaking Bread With the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind should be on everyone's reading list in these times of what a friend of mine calls 'disagreement-phobia' on all sides in politics and life. Jacobs thoughtfully discusses the benefits of reading long-dead authors - even though Edith Wharton was an anti-Semite and David Hume a racist. In this way we practise encountering minds different, and sometimes objectionable, to our own, and find the good, useful and beautiful admixed with the difficult and repulsive. Right and left, young and old, we need this skill more than ever now. -- Naomi Alderman, Books of the Year * Spectator *
Eloquent ... There are moments of great insight here -- Wendy Lesser * New York Times *
Jacobs is a proponent of difference and distance as a means of increasing perspective...when we pick up an old book, we know that 'another human being from another world has spoken to us.' That sense of appreciation may well be applied to the work of all writers, living and dead. There are many worlds, past and present, from which another may speak -- John Glassie * Washington Post *
Alan Jacobs has given us a toolbox stocked with concepts that balance the pop of a self-help book with the depth of a college seminar. Breaking Bread With the Dead is an invitation, but even more than that, an emancipation: from the buzzing prison of the here and now, into the wide-open field of the past. -- Robin Sloan * author of Mr Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore *
This elegant book moved me, especially when it led me to rethink time with my mentors and how they taught me, to paraphrase Wordsworth, what to love and how to love. On so many pages, I found things I know I will carry forward. -- Sherry Turkle * author of Alone Together *
A beautiful case for reading old books as a way to cultivate personal depth in shallow times. Breaking Bread with the Dead is timely and timeless - the perfect ending to the trilogy Alan Jacobs began with The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and continued with How To Think. I've stolen so much from these books. So will you. -- Austin Kleon * bestselling author of Steal Like An Artist *
Alan Jacobs captures the nervous joy of helping students discover that writers of "the long ago and far away" can mitigate the feeling of unmoored loneliness that afflicts so many young people today. Never scolding or didactic, Breaking Bread with the Dead is a compassionate book about the saving power of reading, and a moving account of how writers of the past can help us cope in the frantic present. -- Andrew Delbanco * author of The War Before the War *
