Books in Brief: The Harvard Guide to Influential Books

The Harvard Guide to Influential Books, edited by C. Maury Devine, Claudia M. Dissel, and Kim D. Parrish (Harper & Row, 300 pp., $7.95)

The subtitle of this curiously amusing reference work of sorts, 113 Eminent Harvard Professors Discuss the Books That Have Shaped Their Thinking, like much of the pedagogy practiced not only at Harvard but in other great universities as well, is simply misleading. Clearly, most of the professors listed in this compendium cannot be regarded as eminent at all. Some of them, in more ways than one, are positively obscure. In any case, it was the idea of the editors, three Harvard alumni, to ask more than one hundred of the two thousand full-time faculty members associated with Harvard University to comment on the five or six books that have most influenced them. As one might have expected, many of the professors responded with a degree of laxity that they probably would not tolerate in their students. The award for the biggest howler goes to someone who, apparently, had to read The Canterbury Tales in the modern “translation” by Nevill Coghill. Or is it possible that the bright young editors themselves cannot read Chaucer fresh and whole? Another surprise is that more than an isolated few of Harvard’s future professors came to their initial knowledge of influential books through the Classic Illustrated Comics. A professor of English says that a reading of Three Soldiers, by John Dos Passos, made him a pacifist, though one might have wished for a more substantial exercise of mind on such a question. And how nice it is to know that John Kenneth Galbraith enjoys the lighter things—but, really, Somerset Maugham’s Christmas Holiday? Still, the somewhat alarming good news is that at Harvard it is The Bible (KJV) that earns the greatest number of citations (12), and thus registers the great liberal institution as having something in common with the Bible Belt fundamentalists after all, though a little this side of a Pat Robertson endorsement. The second largest number of citations (11) goes to William Shakespeare, of course, followed by such runners-up as Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud. It seems that Karl Marx is on the wane, with only three citations, and those from professors of government and law. And yet the most wistful disclosure in The Harvard Guide may be found in two sentences from the preface: “There were some” —that is to say, faculty members interviewed for the project—“who were too busy and still others who found the exercise too personal, too painful, or too pointless. We were most comfortable with the professors emeriti, and they were most comfortable with books.” At Harvard, then, this indicates an older and passing generation of highly literate scholars now being replaced by members of the computer generation and by those in obviously contrived special studies. The illiterates are gaining.

TM

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Thomas P. McDonnell

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The Harvard Guide to Influential Books, edited by C. Maury Devine, Claudia M. Dissel, and Kim D. Parrish (Harper & Row, 300 pp., $7.95)

The subtitle of this curiously amusing reference work of sorts, 113 Eminent Harvard Professors Discuss the Books That Have Shaped Their Thinking, like much of the pedagogy practiced not only at Harvard but in other great universities as well, is simply misleading. Clearly, most of the professors listed in this compendium cannot be regarded as eminent at all. Some of them, in more ways than one, are positively obscure. In any case, it was the idea of the editors, three Harvard alumni, to ask more than one hundred of the two thousand full-time faculty members associated with Harvard University to comment on the five or six books that have most influenced them. As one might have expected, many of the professors responded with a degree of laxity that they probably would not tolerate in their students. The award for the biggest howler goes to someone who, apparently, had to read The Canterbury Tales in the modern “translation” by Nevill Coghill. Or is it possible that the bright young editors themselves cannot read Chaucer fresh and whole? Another surprise is that more than an isolated few of Harvard’s future professors came to their initial knowledge of influential books through the Classic Illustrated Comics. A professor of English says that a reading of Three Soldiers, by John Dos Passos, made him a pacifist, though one might have wished for a more substantial exercise of mind on such a question. And how nice it is to know that John Kenneth Galbraith enjoys the lighter things—but, really, Somerset Maugham’s Christmas Holiday? Still, the somewhat alarming good news is that at Harvard it is The Bible (KJV) that earns the greatest number of citations (12), and thus registers the great liberal institution as having something in common with the Bible Belt fundamentalists after all, though a little this side of a Pat Robertson endorsement. The second largest number of citations (11) goes to William Shakespeare, of course, followed by such runners-up as Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud. It seems that Karl Marx is on the wane, with only three citations, and those from professors of government and law. And yet the most wistful disclosure in The Harvard Guide may be found in two sentences from the preface: “There were some” —that is to say, faculty members interviewed for the project—“who were too busy and still others who found the exercise too personal, too painful, or too pointless. We were most comfortable with the professors emeriti, and they were most comfortable with books.” At Harvard, then, this indicates an older and passing generation of highly literate scholars now being replaced by members of the computer generation and by those in obviously contrived special studies. The illiterates are gaining.