All Things Shining

May 30, 2011
Dreyfus and Kelly re-evaluate such classics as Melville's Moby Dick, Homer's Odyssey, and Dante's Divine Comedy to give modern readers a sense of "the wonder we were once capable of." The authors do not push to recover religion but rather to repossess the moods and intensity of the ancient Greeks and shrug off what they perceive to be the present age's epidemic of apathy and nihilism. By juxtaposing canonized authors with David Foster Wallaceâand even Elizabeth GilbertâDreyfus and Kelly explain, expand, and give direction in how to live in a secular age. David Drummond's voice sounds both famous and familiarâas if constantly narrating a movie trailer. As professional as he sounds, over long periods of time it becomes difficult to decipher what is urgent and important when everything sounds so portentous, and movements between chapters and jumps between authors make the listening tricky; it's not always easy to discern where the argument is going and from where it originated without pages to reference. A Free Press hardcover.

November 29, 2010
Eminently qualified philosophers Dreyfus (U.C. Berkeley) and Kelly (Harvard) attempt to trace the decline of the West from the heroic, inspired age of Homer to our secularized, nihilistic age without a sense of transcendence and exultation. Unlike the ancient Greeks, the authors claim, today we lack a sense of the meaningfulness of life, of being called by a transcendent force. They probe this loss through a nonchronological roll call of writers, thinkers, and religious figures central to Western culture: Homer, Jesus, St. Paul, Dante, Luther, Descartes, Melville, and, representing today's unheroic age, David Foster Wallace But this sincere book reads more like a series of set pieces. Ambitious it is, but by turns it drifts or jumps, giving a sense of randomness to its argument. Late in the book, a long section on Moby-Dick notes, "Ahab is a combination of Kant's theory of human beings as autonomous selves and Dante's religious hope for eternal bliss." Such grand statements are not backed by a fully coherent, or a gracefully structured and proportioned argument.

November 15, 2010
Many people in todays world do not recognize shining things when they see them. Instead, feelings of loss, sadness, angst, and despair prevail. Dreyfus and Kelly lament that fact and respond to the situation by introducing (or reintroducing) readers to several literary classics of the Western world. With a balanced mix of philosophy and literature, the authors highlight works like Melvilles Moby Dick, Homers Odyssey, and Dantes Divine Comedy. The organizing principle is mostly thematic, with chapters dealing with nihilism, polytheism, monotheism, and autonomy. The work is not religious in the traditional sense. Jesus and Christianity are brought into the discussion only occasionally as conversation partners, and the target audience includes people who would rather listen to Immanuel Kant than the Apostle Paul. Throughout, the tone is only barely academic. The authors assume their readers have no prior knowledge of the works they discuss. The conclusion is hopefulthat one can live a life worth living in a secular age. It starts with recognizing shining things when we encounter them. This book is proof that some of the Western classics can help us do just that.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)

February 1, 2011

Dreyfus and Kelly (philosophy, Univ. of California, Berkeley, and Harvard Univ., respectively) explore the history of Western literature and philosophy with the aim of exposing how the ancients were able to mine meaning from such pieces while contemporary Westerners are so overwhelmed by choices that they have become blind to the elevating qualities that reflection can provide. Writing in a style that is straightforward and readily accessible to general readers, the authors consistently provide their audience with both reason and model for reengaging wonder at intellectual wonder itself. As they unwind Western intellectual history from Homer, Aristotle, and Augustine to Kant, John Foster Wallace, and beyond, they point to the mechanism by which one generation or era posits meaning on its literary tradition and how that "new idea" suppresses earlier visions of enlightenment. Thus, by the new emerging, the older ideas and ideals necessarily become different from what they were in their own time of mergence. VERDICT Successful in every way: as a clear-eyed history and as a call to move from bloodless analysis to a return to ancient wonder; recommended.--Francisca Goldsmith, Infopeople Project, Berkeley, CA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2010

Two distinguished professors seek mankind's salvation in the ancient Greek gods.

At first glance, this book would seem to be a rebuttal of the spate of arguments for atheism, and a ringing defense of polytheism, or an academic version of a self-help book, showing how to live a richer, more meaningful life by returning to precepts that preceded individual autonomy. In fact, Dreyfus (Philosophy/Univ. of California, Berkeley; On the Internet, 2001, etc.) and Kelly (Philosophy/Harvard Univ.) audaciously promise "nothing less than a philosophical and literary history of the West" in little more than 200 pages, aimed at the "nonspecialist audience" and "general reader." The authors successfully leapfrog through literary-philosophical history to suggest how we can reclaim redemptive qualities sacrificed to modernity. "When we develop in ourselves the ability for this kind of wonder and gratitude then we become a standing invitation to the gods," they write, asserting that one need not believe in those gods to recognize that one's feelings and fate are often shaped by forces outside the self and that there are limits to individual freedom and responsibility. In response to a metaphysical debate framed by Pulp Fiction, the authors write that "[t]he question that really matters...is not whether God was the causal agent but whether gratitude was an appropriate response." In other examples, Dreyfus and Kelly explore meaning (or the nihilism of meaninglessness) in the suicide of David Foster Wallace, the throwing problems of former baseball star Chuck Knoblauch and the rejection by Martin Luther of Aristotle. The book's wide scope is occasionally exasperating in its concision—"But before we move on to Descartes and Kant we will have to make a detour by way of St. Thomas Aquinas and Dante, who draw on Aristotle rather than Plato to make Christianity intelligible in Greek terms"—but the end result, detours and all, suggests a road map to the divine.

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