Customer Reviews

On Dialogue: An Essay in Free Thought

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Mr. Grudin has written a powerful, terse book that should be required reading for all who fashions themselves as lovers of reading, lovers of ideas, or lovers of conversation. I found myself devouring this book--I read it it two days, underlining, writing in the margins, wanting to dialogue with the words.

The scope of the book is vast. All freedoms and liberties, Mr. Grudin avers, exist within and because of dialogue. Dialogue means, simply, any exchange of meaning. From this starting point, any exchange of meaning is relevant and important.

What I found fascinating was Chapter 3, "The Liberty of Ideas." In it, he revives the word "copia" (abundance, plenty) as used by Cicero and Quintilian, and emphasizes how necessary multifarious perspectives are to healthy free-thinking. Linear, mono-thinking boxes and confines the thinker. But variations on a theme--and he uses Erasmus' "The Praise of Folly" as an example--can open up or free our thinking; he writes "copia can be not only a way of expressing things but also a way of discovering and seeing things."

For me, there were great discoveries in each chapter, and I highly endorse this book for this reason. It gives persective and balance in a world filled with extremes.

I plan to re-visit it frequently, as well as give out copies where I can to any that will be open to its wisdom and sanity. Let the dialogues continue.

(Now, I'm reading "The Praise of Folly." Who knows where all this will lead?)