Customer Reviews

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

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2 star:		(3)
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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.

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...)

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.

The Whole Five Feet is much more than a review of the Harvard Classics. Christopher Beha takes on the big questions of life, and answers them in perspective to the classics that he is reading, but in addition with the personal viewpoint of a young man in his twenties who has had to face more than his share of life's difficulties.
The book is a gripping read that I could not put down. It is the story of a family who pulls together to face the crises of life, and addresses them with humor and resolve.

This a great gift for a college graduation or for an aspiring writer.

Beha's debut inspired me in two different ways. First, it explained to me what the Harvard Classics are and instilled an interest in reading them. Second, it encouraged me to continue to write about what I'm reading and combine that with how the books relate to my personal life. Books are great because they can touch each person differently. A personal review of how a book touched you can be much more interesting than a bland third-person book report.

Beha writes about his experience of reading all fifty volumes of the Harvard Classics within one calendar year. The Harvard Classics are a set of books chosen almost a hundred years ago by the then President of Harvard, Charles Eliot. The books were meant to be an educational tool to the common man. In those days illiteracy was much higher and the amount and availability of secondary schooling was much less. Eliot hope that reading 15 minutes of these books per day could "give any man the essentials of a liberal education". The Classics are a selection from the "great books" of non-fiction spanning thousands of years that fit onto one shelf, five feet wide. Just reading through the titles alone, one understand the power of such a shelf.

Chris always impressed me with his way with words and interest in literature. Going to college with him, I viewed him and others amongst our group of friends as a beacon of inspiration for reading within my own life. After declaring Computer Science as my major early on, I focused on engineering and less on artistic side of life. Fortunately, through these guys I saw the character built through an education of language, history, art, music, and other liberal studies. He was among those who inspired to me to pick up "reading for fun" again as I entered my last year of college. Since then, I have made it a focus to enjoy a certain number of books per year to nurture that liberal arts side of me.

The Whole Five Feet describes a rough year for Beha, although he has had several. Interestingly enough, it begins with a sickness and death, and ends with a wedding. This is a classic literature comedy and also very similar the way my year has gone in 2009. I could not have read this at a more fitting time. Beha struggles through a bit of health issues as well, which really helped me relate to him as I recall his initial health issues in college. While I probably could have been a much better friend to him through those troubling times during school, it gives me comfort to now understand in more detail what he went through and how he has since gotten on.

The books within the Classics that Beha relates to provide some inspiration of where to start should I make an attempt at the shelf (maybe in another 5 years...or maybe I'll do the fiction shelf first). His enjoyment of books such as Two Years before the Mast sound extremely enticing to me. However, I am not sure I would share his same boredom with a work such as the Origin of Species. Either way, whether he liked them or not, it only provided more inspiration for me to read them all.

Smart with just the right touch of sass, this book delivers an exceptionally engaging story of two challenges: an intellectual pursuit and real life. The greats of literature and strong storytelling all wrapped up in an accessible, appealingly-written package.

This book is about the place of common knowledge in an era of fragmentation, and of the place of belief in an era of irony. The title of the review comes from Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," which is about the withdrawing sea of faith in the modern age of the 19th century. And yet the 19th century was the age par excellence of Culture with a capital C, of what Arnold himself defined as "the best which has been thought and said." Beha is confronting a world in which faith - which he does not share, although his family are devout Catholics - does not provide the answers he wants and Culture is also often consigned to the dust heap.

As a young man, he is seeking some guidance about how to live his life, and so turns to Culture. This is a brave move to some degree, as Culture is hardly a unifying belief or possession, even among educated people. The idea of the acculturation of immigrants via Culture, which was at the core of Harvard President Charles Eliot's vision of the Five Foot Shelf of Books, now can be questioned on many levels. And yet, what if we (which is to say Beha) were to read these dusty books from the point of view of today?

Beha does find that they speak to him, and perhaps he especially needs it during the year he set aside to read, as he and his beloved aunt become seriously ill. This is not a Cliff Notes guide to the great books, which would probably not be that interesting, but rather a reflection on what greatness is and how death does not end the conversation. To be great is to be immortal and to be able to touch many lives, including Beha's.

This book is billed as a year of reading the classics, but it's also about coping with cancer and death and how reading can help us through the hard times. The most compelling part to me was the author's memoir--he was diagnosed with cancer while still in college, then went through grueling treatment only to come down with a terrible case of Lyme disease. At the same time, his aunt was diagnosed with cancer, and died. Beha writes in a compelling, clear-sighted, and gentle voice---he loses his faith but remains an optimist. It's a wonderful book for anyone looking for help through hard times, or just pondering why hard times come and how we can respond.

Like so many thinking young people, Christopher Beha grapples with the fundamental meaning of life and his place in it. Unlike most of his peers, however, he has been able to relate his quest for meaning and understanding in a moving paean to literature and those who penned it. The Whole Five Feet is a stunning first book by an author who, despite his young age, has much to say, yet says it with economy, perspective and focus. As I read, I found myself frequently returning to the back flap of the book's dust jacket to remind myself that the author is still a young man, writing at the start of life's journey, not at its end. Mr. Beha eloquently relates his evolving sense of self as he reads through the 51 volumes of the venerable Harvard Classics (the volumes of which cover five feet of shelf space). He learns that "books draw meaning from life, but they also give meaning in return". In The Whole Five Feet, Christopher Beha movingly demonstrates the truth of this statement by artfully juxtaposing the sometimes tragic, sometimes comic experiences of one year in his young life with the eternal words of the books chosen for Dr. Elliot's magnum opus. If this book is an indication of what we can expect from Mr. Beha in the future, the future is rosy indeed.

This book goes nowhere and says nothing. The author attempts to link his life, family, and suffering to the experience of reading the whole five foot shelf of Harvard classics, but the book just does not hang together for me. It reads more like a collection of blog posts than a synthetic whole, and there is no evidence that reading the series did anything but affirm the author's self-absorbed, post-modern secular worldview. I will be glad when this genre dies out, as few authors are talented enough to link their narrative with the object of their activity. The author writes clearly (hence the two stars), but a clear view of the largely insignificant (and often contrived) thoughts about the object of his toil is really no view at all. I wish that there was something more positive to say, but all I can muster is that I am glad that the book did not take very much time out of my life to read.