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

Christopher Beha (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 6, 2009

In The Whole Five Feet, Christopher Beha turns to the great books for answers after undergoing a series of personal and family crises and learning that his grandmother had used the Harvard Classics to educate herself during the Great Depression. Inspired by her example, Beha vows to read the entire Five-Foot Shelf, one volume a week, over the course of the next year. As he passes from St. Augustine’s Confessions to Don Quixote, from Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast to essays by Cicero, Emerson, and Thoreau, he takes solace in the realization that many of the authors are grappling with the same questions he faces: What is the purpose of life? How do we live a good life? What can the wisdom of the past teach us about our own challenges? Beha’s chronicle is a smart, big-hearted, and inspirational mix of memoir and intellectual excursion—and a powerful testament to what great books can teach us about how to live our own lives.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At first glance, Beha's situation is enviable: the 27-year-old Princeton graduate quits his job and is welcomed back into his parents' Manhattan apartment, where he decides to dedicate himself to reading all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics Library, a five-foot shelf of (mostly) Western literature from Plato to Darwin. If only it were that easy: he must come to terms with the death of a beloved aunt early in the year, then is himself afflicted with a torn meniscus and a serious case of Lyme disease. With so much personal drama, the classics frequently take a back seat, and several volumes go completely unremarked. Beha spends the most time on those books that spoke most keenly to his personal circumstances; not only does he discuss John Stuart Mill's existential crisis at length, for example, he compares his own reaction to reading Wordsworth to the philosopher's. The broader conclusions Beha (now an assistant editor at Harper's) reaches about cultural values and the meaning of life are disappointingly pat; even the young memoirist concedes, I haven't written the book I set out to write. (May)
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Review

“ ‘In much wisdom is much grief,’ counsels the book of Ecclesiastes, and in Christopher R. Beha’s tender intellectual memoir [of reading the Harvard Classics], we find plenty of both. . . . Life intruded rudely on Beha’s sabbatical, and he rose to the occasion by writing an unexpected narrative that deftly reconciles lofty thoughts and earthy pain. In doing so, he makes an elegant case for literature as an everyday companion no less valuable than the iPod.” —New York Times Book Review

“Winning . . . Intensely felt . . . Beha is shtick-free and serious of mind . . . Without making grandiose claims, this book serves as a guide to today’s perplexed, reflexively ironic reader, an inducement to think seriously without apologizing and feel deeply without hedging. . . . It demonstrates how and why to read seriously.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“An elegant and honest memoir . . . A charming addition to the literature of books about books. Beha is a clear-sighted writer, who has accomplished exactly what Eliot would have wanted: He found repose and strength of mind in those who express things more elegantly than we, in our Twittering, blog-filled age, ever can.” —Bookforum

“Disarming . . . Beha’s utter humility and unpretentious tone while describing an inherently academic and potentially irrelevant goal—to read a jumble of old-timey books and essays—puts the reader immediately at ease. Beha has a nice, unaffected way of including his internal monologues and the lessons he learns over the course of the year, as he struggles with his need to connect with the past and get perspective on his life. . . . What starts out as a mission to keep from being lost, adrift and alone in his sickness, ends with Beha finding solace. The Whole Five Feet reads like a charming college syllabus, written by a warm-hearted professor, who through a mutual love of books has inexplicably become one of your closest friends and confidants.” —The Portland Mercury

“[In the Harvard Classics, Beha] finds comfort in the fact that these writers faced the same dilemmas, pains and sources of hope he finds today. The result is a thought-provoking, tender, compelling read that is part memoir, part ode to the power of great books.” —The Oregonian

"The Whole Five Feet is no book report; Beha’s reflections are far the richer because he delicately wheels and dives among both the great writers’ ideas and his own life experiences—proving, if we needed proof, of the greatness and centrality of reading. About John Stuart Mill, Beha reflects on the nature of pleasure and happiness, observing through the prism of his own illnesses, 'Your comfort, especially your physical comfort, isn’t under your control, so you’d better find something else to work at.' The idea here is mature far beyond his years, and yet the style is all salt spray and blue sky." —Free Range Librarian

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (May 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802118844
• ISBN-13: 978-0802118844
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #234,442 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Liberal Arts Matter!, May 8, 2009

By 

Odysseus (New Jersey) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else (Hardcover)

In an era when the race to develop technology and standardized testing have changed the nature of education, reading The Whole Five Feet reminds us why a liberal arts education is important for everyone. Beha, as a cancer survivor, is no ludite, he knows that we must progress in the sciences as well, but all of us will be, as Beha finds himself, more thoughtful people for spending some time with the great books.

Ironically, though Beha is well educated, he finds that he needs the Classics as much as the intended working class audience of 100 years ago. Sadly, many of us who are educated were exposed to the great books when we did not have enough life experience to understand them. I hope that The Whole Five Feet will inspire many to turn back to the Classics and to use our leisure time to continue our educations, as well as to think hard about how we are educating young people today.

The published reviewers miss the point when they complain that Beha's responses to the Classics were not always profound. First of all, they were sometimes profound, which is enough, and secondly they were honest. It is just as important to admit when a great book does not move us, and to examine why it may still be worth reading (or not). Too many of these "I did this in a year" projects come out too neatly to be true.

As to the matter of his age, in some areas he has wisdom beyond his years, and in others he relates to books as a young twenty-something. This does not make what he has to say less important -- in fact, we have plenty of places to find out what the grey haired men think about the classics, the very fact of his youth in undertaking this project makes it that much more interesting and should recommend this book to those who teach the classics and work with young people.

As a supporter of young artists, I found it fascinating to see how Beha evolves as both a reader and a writer over the course of the year, and to accompany him on this journey. In this way, the book is well edited, because it is clear that the early chapters were not totally re-written to neatly build to the conclusion. This adds to the honesty of the experience, which is almost documentary as much as memoir.

While we readers may not have the luxury of quitting our day jobs to embrace the Classics, we can read while we live, we do not (and, he seems to say, perhaps should not) need to leave the world in order to learn from books. Beha is not so much attempting to give us neat answers to our lives as he is giving us a window on his personal search for truth and wisdom, thereby encouraging us to purue our own. In that way, he honors and extends Eliot's original intent with the Classics.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A highly personal tale of "literary peak-bagging", June 3, 2009

By 

S. McGee (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else (Hardcover)

Toward the end of this fascinating story, Christopher Beha admits that it isn't the book he had intended to write -- and all I can say is, thank heavens for that. The plan, he says, was to tell a tale that was "essentially a comedy, about a feckless, somewhat lost young man who shuts himself away from the modern world and its cultural white-noise -- from life as it's lived in his own time and place -- to immerse himself in classic literature." In other words, Beha's book was intended as one in a series of what I somewhat flippantly refer to as 'stunt stories', books revolving around their authors' attempts to perform some feat, such as learning to cook like Julia Child, read all of Proust or live Biblically, typically within an allotted timeframe. (In this case, Beha set out to read all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics within a year.)

It's a cute idea, and if that had been the book that Beha had produced, it wouldn't have been interesting enough to review. Because, frankly, the ideas of a 20-something having something profound to say about a century-old compendium of 'great books' is, well, improbable. But what Beha found instead is that the works included the the 'five foot shelf' of books in the Harvard Classics series produced a series of unexpected lessons and insights. First of all, there were no pat answers or easy insights or epiphanies. Secondly, far from removing himself from the events of his life, the books both helped him make sense of that life and drove him back into the world. "Books draw meaning from life, but they also give meaning in return," he concludes. "These books wouldn't let me lose myself."

There were times when Beha would have relished being able to do so. The year that he spent reading the classics -- which starts, oddly, with Benjamin Franklin's autobiography and then ranges from Homer's Odyssey and the Greek dramatists, to Oliver Wendell Holmes's writings on medicine and Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, with stops along the way for Cervantes and Dante -- was a year marked with personal tragedy and trauma. A beloved aunt, dying of cancer, lives with his family and while he is occupying himself with his reading he is also caring for her and trying to cope with her death. Himself a cancer survivor, Beha then must grapple with his own series of illnesses, including a bout of Lyme disease. These all trigger a lot of existential thought, logically enough, which affects how he digests what it is that he's reading and how he reacts to it.

His reading cause Beha to question even the nature of knowledge. People would ask him what he had 'learned' from the books; he was all to aware that an honest answer, that he felt as if he was being initiated into a kind of fraternity, that he was "learning how to be in the world", would only sound pretentious.

I disagree with the Publishers Weekly review that Beha's conclusions are 'disappointingly pat'. Rather, they are personal. Anyone else conducting the experiment would have written a very different book; should Beha himself return and repeat the experiment at the age of 50, no doubt he will choose to focus on very different works; less about John Stuart Mill, perhaps, and more on Milton or Moliere. And certainly he'll draw very different conclusions, because his life experiences will be different, just as any of us attempting to write a book may (or may not!) have written something as good, but certainly would have written something that was just as personal. But not all of us would have been as prepared as Beha to let events overtake us and divert us from our well-laid plans. And that is Beha's ultimate triumph; that he allowed himself to be forced by the events of the year and by his reactions to what he read to write this book rather than what would have been a self-conscious and suitably ironic book about the nature of Great Books. Maybe the latter would have had more erudite insights, but it wouldn't have been as honest or as compelling for readers. I would have found it hard to take that book seriously; this one reads like an honest self-evaluation at a pivotal point in a young man's life. No, it may not stand alongside Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast" as worthy of inclusion in a future edition of Harvard Classics, but it's a thoughtful and very well-written rumination on the nature of reading, the importance of books and of a life lived thoughtfully. At a point in time when reality television shows are taking over the airwaves and the kind of attention that's required to peruse this kind of writing seems to be hard to find in our overcrowded, hectic lives, it's a relief to find someone of Beha's age finding value in words written centuries ago.

Highly recommended for anyone looking for a well-written and thought-provoking but not overwhelming non-fiction book that can be easily packed and taken along on vacation by those who want something a bit more meaty than the latest thriller or romance.

For those with Kindles -- Many of the volumes of the Harvard classics that Beha devoured are also available in Kindle editions for a mere 99 cents, thus making the 51 volumes a very cost-effective proposition indeed. (And rather than five feet of shelf space, they take up only part of your one inch-wide Kindle...)

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Touching and accessible -- a must-read for any reader, April 27, 2009

By 

John Carr (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else (Hardcover)

The Whole Five Feet is a joy to read, and you don't have to be well-versed in the classics to find immense satisfaction in the story of a guy who took a year to read them. In fact, the fun of this story lies in how deeply personal Beha's story becomes. You wind up realizing that reading is never a passive endeavor -- you always bring yourself into it, and what you get out of it will depend to some degree on what's going on in your life at the time. During his year of reading, Beha suffers profound loss and illness. In his reading he finds not answers but comfort, and the repeated urging of authors within the canon to get out and live life. Again and again, he finds that these great writers are really just people of different cultures and eras who were consumed with the very same questions we all wrestle with today.

Beha writes in a smart and accessible style, and he seems more a friend to the texts he discusses than a student of them. He seems, in fact, to be the ideal reader, which happens to make him the ideal writer to capture this experience on the page. This book serves an inspiration, both to go back and read those classics, and also to keep moving forward and live a rich and fulfilling life.