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30 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Next time, I 'll wait, February 6, 2000
for the paperback instead of letting media buzz influence my choice of reading matter. "For Common Things," a cycle of six long essays in book form, was engaging enough but not the "wowser" I thought it would be from all the hype it had gotten. Essays nos. 1-3 and 6 are abstruse and interrelated, nos. 4 and 5 are more specific, dealing with environmental politics and genetic engineering. Purdy puts the blame on "irony" for most of our current ills. He can get away with this because he never defines irony and so it can mean almost anything bad--not just the tragedy of unintended consequences but cynicism, narcissism, despair, political apathy, that jaundiced feeling, hard-heartedness, and so on. He makes a pretty good case for giving up on all this irony and becoming more emotional, more risk-taking, even taking a chance on politics--but then, it has to be HIS type of politics, as we find out in chapters 4 and 5. Purdy's prose style is so beautiful I had almost forgotten he is only 25 until he veered into "political correctness"--that and the fact he is forever reminding us of how interconnected the human species is (honestly, he does everything but quote John Donne's "No man is an island"). I wish I could have given "For Common Things" four stars and I would have if the argument had flowed a little more smoothly and if the author had been a little less self-absorbed. But he will undoubtedly mellow with age. Most of what I've seen written about him is unfair in the extreme: refusal to argue the merits of his book, shallow ad hominem attacks on his West Va. background and Ivy League education (some even want to pillory him for being a hick AND an East Coast snob--doubly unfair and doubly irrelevant). The book is worth reading, but don't push anyone out of the way to do so.
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45 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The earnestness makes the book, November 19, 1999
By A Customer
I have just finished the book and I have also read the reviews here on the website. I will concur with other Jed defenders here that I, too, am a bit taken aback by the somewhat less than civil tone employed by his detractors. But then again, these are the very reactions that Purdy is talking about when he says we are afraid to make our deepest hopes and desires publicly known for fear of trivialization by others. Yet he still earnestly writes this self-described "love letter", in hopes that others might feel their own earnest spirit calling from within. As he says in the preface, he hopes the book may cause another to say, "Yes, you are not alone in that". As a 25 year old myself, it was refreshing to see such a fresh perspective coming from my generation. Although I was always a Seinfeld fan, I am beginning to realize the damage an emotionally devoid, self-interested "That's a shame" response to things tickling our conscience is having on our relationships with each other and our earth. Although I do not consider myself an intellectual (I read the book with a Webster's Unabridged, looking up "Promethean" early was wise.) on Purdy's level, I still feel a strong connection to Jedediah's sense of hope, and perhaps to dispelling the prevailing general sense that the trajectory we are on, as a society and planet, is irreversible. I am grateful to Jedediah for putting his heart on public display, regardless of the slings and arrows he may bear for it. In a time when people seem to be retreating further and further away from the public domain, taking their best hopes and dreams with them, Purdy stands his ground there with his heart on his sleeve, for all to see.
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34 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Opie's Examined Life*, November 14, 1999
Through Plato's pen, Socrates said that an "unexamined life is not worth living." Now through the earnest words of a recent Harvard graduate, a twenty-four-year-old examines our modern lives and offers us a prescription for what ails us. The ailment is irony, or more finely put, "ironic detachment." Its chief avatar is the television character Jerry Seinfeld, who moves in and out of relationships with all the enthusiasm of a jaded, I've-seen-it-all-and-could-care-less New Yorker, which, of course, he is. Written by Jedediah Purdy, For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today targets an array of cultural arbiters who value cleverness over curiosity, style over substance, self-awareness over social immersion, and, above all, the private over the public. For his efforts, Purdy has reaped scornful reproaches from the very class of ironists he preemptively criticizes. As someone more than twice Purdy's age, I am both amazed and tinged with a bit of envy that a young creature of a West Virginia hollow could possess so much erudition, wisdom, and perspicacity. I dare say that most twenty-four-year-olds could not spell Montaigne let alone quote his magnificent expressions. But Purdy-drawing upon the writings of the 16th-century French essayist; the observations of Tocqueville (which serve as epigraphs in Purdy's book); the philosophies of Kant, Rousseau, and Hegel; the life and words of Wendell Berry; and the profound experiences of Adam Michnik, the brave Polish dissident who retained his integrity as his country succumbed to capitalist rot-urges us to reject ironic detachment in favor of a renewed commitment to the commonweal. Chief among his detractors is Roger D. Hodge, who offered a scathing indictment of Purdy's new book in the September issue of Harper's Magazine. Entitled "Thus Spoke Jedediah: The Distilled Wisdom of a Cornpone Prophet," Hodge, with impatient disdain, says that Purdy belongs to "a line of young Ivy-educated authors whose prose briefly quickened the hearts of the marketing executives who decide which titles will appear at the front of book catalogues, in Barnes & Noble display windows, and on the banner of the Amazon.com home page. And yet how utterly worthless are their books, stacked on remainder shelves in the basements of used-book stores soon after their publication, their notoriety worn thin, their authors' careers all but over." On the contrary, counters Walter Kirn in Time Magazine. "Purdy's book is a precocious diatribe against the sort of media-savvy detachment that passes for intelligence and maturity in the age of Letterman...It is not the accessible pop polemic some reviewers have made it out to be but an achingly ambitious manifesto from a very young man who happens to be, alarmingly often, eloquent beyond his years." Jedediah Purdy was raised on a farm and homeschooled by his parents, mostly his philosophy-trained mother. At the age of 14 he entered New Hampshire's prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy. From there he matriculated at Harvard, where he became "obsessed with ethics," quotes Time. Yet he returned to the family farm at every opportunity to directly experience "the mundane," which, as he reminds us in his book, comes from the Latin mundus-`the world.' He is now studying law and the environment at Yale. In his spare time, it would appear, he writes best-selling manifestoes. What are the "common things" he describes? Essentially they are three "ecologies"-moral, political, and environmental-which are inextricably linked and interdependent. Purdy sets these against our zealous, uncritical embrace of all things private, which, he says, connotes deprivation. He sharply rebukes management guru Tom Peters, who, in his most recent incarnation, champions "You.com," the self as marketed product. (Peters, like his weight, dramatically fluctuates. He used to praise "excellent" corporations for their respect for and involvement of employees. He embraced quality and systems, à la Deming and Juran. A couple of years ago, he recanted. He began to promote virtual companies like Sara Lee, which have a brand name, relatively few officers, a host of products made by others, and no loyalties. Today, Peters proclaims the individual über alles-you are but your résumé, which must constantly be marketed.) The magazines Wired and Fast Company promote greed and self-absorption, argues Purdy. Bill Clinton resorts to facile rhetoric in manipulating public opinion, yet delivers little. Worse, Purdy suggests, the President's hypocritical behavior exquisitely models ironic detachment, feeding the growing cynicism toward public institutions. Purdy, as you have gathered, is a self-proclaimed progressive, acutely concerned for the environment and anxious to improve society. Time writes that "his broader goal is to spur a resurgence in grass-roots public activism." But it's an activism steeped in reason, nurtured by the mundane, and profoundly compassionate. It is not "Promethean," he argues. Rather, it draws on our best public traditions and decides human nature in favor of Rousseau over Hobbes. We would surely profit from more young sages like Purdy and far fewer of what writer Calvin Trillin calls `Sabbath gasbags.' After all, there are very real problems out there that command our urgent attention. * After hearing Purdy on NPR's Morning Edition, I could not resist the image of Ron Howard as Opie. The voice is pure and fresh and innocent. But the words reveal perceptive sagacity. Given his book's nasty reception by the ironists he abhors, Purdy may be deterred from writing another. However, I suspect that he will energetically pursue his overarching goals. And his splendid portfolio should provide this polymath with ample opportunity to make a difference in the world.
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