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

From the Publisher

"Augie March used them to climb out of poverty. Malcolm X did time with them in prison. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby bantered about them in MGM's High Society. Assembled one hundred years ago by the longtime president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, the Harvard Classics are a set of great books, ranging from Plato to Dante to Darwin, that were designed to educate working-class adults in an era when only 3 percent of Americans were college graduates. Dr. Eliot's "Five-Foot Shelf" went on to sell millions of volumes and became a cultural landmark." "As a child, Chris Beha viewed the dusty shelf of Harvard Classics at his grandmother's house as little more than intellectual window dressing. Many years after her death, however, he learns that his grandmother had actually used these books to educate herself as a young woman during the Great Depression. As a twenty-something Ivy League grad with literary ambitions, Beha is startled to realize that a woman he never thought of as especially literary probably had a better grasp on intellectual history than he did." "Inspired by her example, and seeking to get his life back on track after a devastating illness, Beha decides to read the entire Five-Foot Shelf - one volume a week - over the course of the next year. As his reading progresses from St. Augustine's Confessions to Don Quixote, from Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast to works by Homer, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Thoreau, it becomes clear that the authors of the classics are grappling with the same questions he faces: What is the purpose of life? How do we live a good life? Can the wisdom of the past help us to meet contemporary challenges? As the year goes on and Beha's ownlife is touched by tragedy, these matters take on a new urgency." Equal parts memoir and intellectual excursion, The Whole Five Feet is the story of a modern young man who spends a year in passionate engagement with the past. By living his own life while reading the best thinkers that western civilization has produced, he rediscovers the relevance of the great books and delivers a wise, hopeful, and immensely satisfying meditation on what they can teach us about life and death, and how to navigate both in the present tense.

The New York Times - Alexander Nazaryan

Beha’s cheerleading for the classics does have limits: "I can say with some confidence that my eyes passed over every word" is about as much rah-rah as he can summon for Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (Volume XI). Yet he approaches the classics without the apocalyptic vision of a culture warrior or the sort of popularizing sentiment that glibly reduces Aristotle to a self-help guru. The classics humble, as they ought to. Reflecting on the thousands of pages he has read in what might fairly be called an annus horribilis, Beha realizes that "all the knowledge in the world is small recompense for the things we can’t possibly know."

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)

Stacy Russo - Library Journal

At the age of 27, Beha, assistant editor at Harper's magazine, was not having the best of times. Although he won a battle with cancer, other areas of his life were falling apart. In the midst of his difficulties, Beha set a goal to read all volumes of the Harvard Classics within one year. Also referred to as the "Five-Foot Shelf," the 22,000 pages of the 1909 collection were meant to provide the common man with an education. As Beha speeds through the volumes, details of his personal life are intermingled with his understanding of the texts. Time constraints permit little reflection on his readings. It is likely for this reason that Beha's own story becomes more interesting than his comments on the classics. He reads Shakespeare, Milton, Darwin, Locke, and countless others at a breakneck pace. Near the end, he questions if a slower and more meditative focus may have been a better strategy. He is probably right, but such an approach would not have produced this charming odyssey. Recommended for public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Deciding to spend a year reading the entire 50-volume set of the Harvard Classics, Harper's assistant editor Beha discovers things-some touching, some banal-about the best-laid plans of mice and men. The author interlaces several stories in his debut. The main thread comprises even smaller ones-his reactions to the texts. He also tells about the Classics' editor, Charles W. Eliot, and the genesis and publication of the volumes, about his family and-most prominently-about his illnesses: Hodgkin's lymphoma (diagnosed while he was in college), Lyme disease, hives and a torn meniscus. A medical mess much of the time, Beha nonetheless persevered, reading while ill, while visiting relatives and while flying to England with family. (As he read a volume of Elizabethan drama, many of his fellow passengers watched Nicole Kidman in The Invasion.) There are moments of bizarre amusement-such as when the author, with his mother in the waiting room, makes a deposit in a sperm bank-and wrenching loss (the death of a favorite aunt). Beha is most effective when discussing the fragility of life, the certainty and uncertainties of death, and how the various writers he read dealt with it-or didn't. He is moved by Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," struggles through the two volumes by Darwin, ponders the problems of translation (so many of the originals were not in English), finds the grimness in Grimm, lingers overlong with Don Quixote, says very little about some texts, quotes favorite passages from others and finds himself changing as the year advances. He has a number of epiphanies-some rather ordinary: "life was teaching me about these books just as much as the books were teaching me about life." Finally, heresolves to remain a reader in the nonliterary contemporary American culture he comes close to condemning. The personal and family stories are almost always gripping; the comments about great books, less so. Agent: Sally Wofford-Girand/Brick House

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