The Whole Five Feet

What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everthing Else

Christopher R. Beha

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780802199904
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

This unique memoir of reading the classics to find strength and wisdom "makes an elegant case for literature as an everyday companion" ( The New York Times Book Review ). While undergoing a series of personal and family crises, Christopher R. Beha discovered that his grandmother had used the Harvard Classics—the renowned "five foot shelf" of great world literature compiled in the early twentieth century by Charles William Eliot—to educate herself during the Great Depression. He decided to follow her example and turn to this series of great books for answers—and recounts the experience here in a smart, big-hearted, and inspirational mix of memoir and intellectual excursion that "deftly illustrates how books can save one's life" (Helen Schulman). "As he grapples with the death of his beloved grandmother, a debilitating bout with Lyme disease and other major and minor calamities, Beha finds that writers as diverse as Wordsworth, Pascal, Kant and Mill had been there before, and that the results of their struggles to find meaning in life could inform his own." — The Seattle Times "An important book [and] a sheer blast to read." —Heidi Julavits

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction, or “A Careful and Persistent Reader”
• January, or “I Made a Little Book”
• February, or “Take Up and Read”
• March, or “Not By the Knowledge of Words”
• April, or “Mambrino’s Helmet”
• May, or “To the Daughters of the Air!”
• June, or “No Wiser Than Before”
• July, or “The Enjoyments of Life”
• August, or “Go to Grass”
• September, or “Not of Athens, but of the World”
• October, or “To My Own Sons, and Those of My Teachers”
• November, or “Food for Future Years”
• December, or “The Thinking Reed”
• Afterword, or “I Shall Go On in the Same Way”
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix I
• Appendix II