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mariesreads's review against another edition
4.0
So glad I own this. Denby is a great guy to read the classics with. Fun and informative and intriguing discussions of the "western canon" as well.
greeniezona's review against another edition
3.0
(review originally written for bookslut)
Great Books by David Denby is by no means itself a great book, though it is entertaining enough, I suppose. Being the avid bookslut that I am, I am always fascinated by other people's lists of books. "100 Greatest Books of All Time," "100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century," "Sixteen Books to Read This Summer," -- I'm a sucker for them all. So it is no wonder that when I saw this book about the controversy over the dead-white-European-male-centrism of the "canon" lying in a bargain pile, I had to pick it up.
The premise of the book is certainly interesting. Started in 1991, when there was much public debate over whether the Western canon, as taught in universities around the country, oppressed female and non-white students by excluding works written by any author that was not white, European, male, and dead for a really long time. The author was disgusted by such arguments and evidently railed on about it quite a lot, because his wife was eventually driven to tell him to "put up or shut up." And put up he did. Denby enrolled at Columbia University and signed up for two full year courses, Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilizations. By the time the year was over, he had read an impressive selection of works, ranging from Homer and Plato to The Bible, Marx and Engles, Austen and Woolf, Darwin, and Beauvoir. He then wrote about his reactions to the texts, his professors' approaches to teaching them, and the response of his classmates, which were predominantly in their first or second year of college.
As far as Denby sticks to his own reactions to the texts, I generally found the book to be very engaging. It was where he wandered off into all kinds of theories about how whole classes of people live and what they believe that started to grate on me. It's clear from the very beginning that Denby thinks the argument that students could be harmed in any way by being taught from an exclusively "Dead White European Male" canon is ridiculous. The fact that he believes this doesn't bother me, but the way he addresses the entire political Left and all liberals as if they all want to see the Western canon dismantled and abandoned got old fast. But this was just the beginning of Denby treating very large groups as a homogenous and offensive whole. Most of these arguments against what other people believe are dismissive, and are rarely accompanied by an explanation of what he, himself, believes. The one exception is Denby's obsession with the fact that he was once mugged (in New York City, where he lives, and he wasn't harmed, nor did he lose his wallet, only his cash). After dragging the issue through several chapters and a lot of presumptuous attempts to explain the motives of his muggers, he finally postulates that the solution to inner city crime is work. As if McDonalds opening fast-food chains in the ghetto would solve everything.
Now that I've gotten that rant out of the way, I can get back to what I actually did like about the book. I appreciated that he wasn't too proud to admit that some of the texts were difficult reading. I was also impressed with how honest he was about the prejudices and preconceptions he brought to many of the readings -- and the apparent joy he found in being proven wrong. I of course found a few books to add to my ludicrously long to-read list, but the most enjoyable part was reading his reactions to books I had already read, which were embarrassingly few and far between.
How to close? I enjoyed the book, but I also flung it across the room on occasion. If you're willing to wade through naive impressions of Take Back the Night marches and slanders against every political point of view, by all means, read this book. However I am of the opinion that the only reason this book was a New York Times bestseller is because it had the benefit of good timing and a unique premise. It offers interesting impressions but no new opinions. You want to know what it's like to read the Western canon? Email Jessa and ask her to make it the next Bookslut project. Until then (maybe even then, I'm not that cocky), you're better off reading them on your own.
Great Books by David Denby is by no means itself a great book, though it is entertaining enough, I suppose. Being the avid bookslut that I am, I am always fascinated by other people's lists of books. "100 Greatest Books of All Time," "100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century," "Sixteen Books to Read This Summer," -- I'm a sucker for them all. So it is no wonder that when I saw this book about the controversy over the dead-white-European-male-centrism of the "canon" lying in a bargain pile, I had to pick it up.
The premise of the book is certainly interesting. Started in 1991, when there was much public debate over whether the Western canon, as taught in universities around the country, oppressed female and non-white students by excluding works written by any author that was not white, European, male, and dead for a really long time. The author was disgusted by such arguments and evidently railed on about it quite a lot, because his wife was eventually driven to tell him to "put up or shut up." And put up he did. Denby enrolled at Columbia University and signed up for two full year courses, Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilizations. By the time the year was over, he had read an impressive selection of works, ranging from Homer and Plato to The Bible, Marx and Engles, Austen and Woolf, Darwin, and Beauvoir. He then wrote about his reactions to the texts, his professors' approaches to teaching them, and the response of his classmates, which were predominantly in their first or second year of college.
As far as Denby sticks to his own reactions to the texts, I generally found the book to be very engaging. It was where he wandered off into all kinds of theories about how whole classes of people live and what they believe that started to grate on me. It's clear from the very beginning that Denby thinks the argument that students could be harmed in any way by being taught from an exclusively "Dead White European Male" canon is ridiculous. The fact that he believes this doesn't bother me, but the way he addresses the entire political Left and all liberals as if they all want to see the Western canon dismantled and abandoned got old fast. But this was just the beginning of Denby treating very large groups as a homogenous and offensive whole. Most of these arguments against what other people believe are dismissive, and are rarely accompanied by an explanation of what he, himself, believes. The one exception is Denby's obsession with the fact that he was once mugged (in New York City, where he lives, and he wasn't harmed, nor did he lose his wallet, only his cash). After dragging the issue through several chapters and a lot of presumptuous attempts to explain the motives of his muggers, he finally postulates that the solution to inner city crime is work. As if McDonalds opening fast-food chains in the ghetto would solve everything.
Now that I've gotten that rant out of the way, I can get back to what I actually did like about the book. I appreciated that he wasn't too proud to admit that some of the texts were difficult reading. I was also impressed with how honest he was about the prejudices and preconceptions he brought to many of the readings -- and the apparent joy he found in being proven wrong. I of course found a few books to add to my ludicrously long to-read list, but the most enjoyable part was reading his reactions to books I had already read, which were embarrassingly few and far between.
How to close? I enjoyed the book, but I also flung it across the room on occasion. If you're willing to wade through naive impressions of Take Back the Night marches and slanders against every political point of view, by all means, read this book. However I am of the opinion that the only reason this book was a New York Times bestseller is because it had the benefit of good timing and a unique premise. It offers interesting impressions but no new opinions. You want to know what it's like to read the Western canon? Email Jessa and ask her to make it the next Bookslut project. Until then (maybe even then, I'm not that cocky), you're better off reading them on your own.
spiderfly's review against another edition
1.0
When Denby is talking about the books he is reading and how much he loves them... those are good parts. It was also nice to get ideas about other classics that I could read. Beyond those things, I really disliked this book. His opinions on everything were so annoying. Even when I agreed with his opinions, I was annoyed by his way of talking about them.
eberico's review against another edition
5.0
This book challenged and affirmed my thoughts on the Western Canon – the much-maligned, desperately loved canon. From my blog:
A review from Amazon: "As a former classics major, I have followed the debate over the western canon with a great deal of interest. But after slogging through [a:Harold Bloom|236|Harold Bloom|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1212940902p2/236.jpg]'s [b:The Western Canon|20941|The Western Canon The Books and School of the Ages|Harold Bloom|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167301334s/20941.jpg|347796] for over a year and a half, this book was an absolute delight. I totally agree! I've been slugging through [b:The Western Canon|20941|The Western Canon The Books and School of the Ages|Harold Bloom|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167301334s/20941.jpg|347796] for a few days, not a year and a half, and I'm finding Denby a delight. His responses to the books and poems aren't those of a critic or stuffy academic - they are the reactions of a reader. OK, I guess that isn't totally accurate. Denby IS a critic - he has written for The New Yorker, among others - but I guess his responses just seemed more natural than Bloom. He is exhausted, horrified, delighted, bored, etc. It feels like a post-class debriefing with a friend - not a lecture during which you're likely to fall asleep, then get yelled at by the prof. I love it and feel bad that I didn't finish the book the first time I started.
A review from Amazon: "As a former classics major, I have followed the debate over the western canon with a great deal of interest. But after slogging through [a:Harold Bloom|236|Harold Bloom|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1212940902p2/236.jpg]'s [b:The Western Canon|20941|The Western Canon The Books and School of the Ages|Harold Bloom|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167301334s/20941.jpg|347796] for over a year and a half, this book was an absolute delight. I totally agree! I've been slugging through [b:The Western Canon|20941|The Western Canon The Books and School of the Ages|Harold Bloom|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167301334s/20941.jpg|347796] for a few days, not a year and a half, and I'm finding Denby a delight. His responses to the books and poems aren't those of a critic or stuffy academic - they are the reactions of a reader. OK, I guess that isn't totally accurate. Denby IS a critic - he has written for The New Yorker, among others - but I guess his responses just seemed more natural than Bloom. He is exhausted, horrified, delighted, bored, etc. It feels like a post-class debriefing with a friend - not a lecture during which you're likely to fall asleep, then get yelled at by the prof. I love it and feel bad that I didn't finish the book the first time I started.
s_books's review against another edition
2.0
This was an okay book. The authors connections to events happening outside the books (even if they are just in the classroom) are not always that interesting and sometimes feel a bit dated. It would probably be more interesting to read the books he reads than his own book.
dbaker's review against another edition
1.0
A few good points scattered throughout the 460 pages, but this book is impossibly bloated and self-indulgent.
valkyriejmu's review
4.0
On the one hand, I really enjoyed reading Denby's adventures with the Great Books and it changed my opinion about their relevance. On the other hand, it resulted in some less enjoyable reading excursions that were the literary equivalent of cod liver oil.
trilobiter's review
2.0
I am enough of a romanticist to buy Denby's central point, that the "great books" of Western Literature are valuable for aesthetic and instructive reasons. Indeed, when describing his response to the classic authors in those terms, the writing is fun and enjoyable.
Unfortunately, there is more to this book. Much of it is devoted to Denby's social/political commentary, which might best be described as the ultimate middle class white man's perspective on the culture wars of the 1990s. Not all of it is face-slappingly offensive, and he goes out of his way to present the views he disagrees with. But it is one thing to tweak a few post-modernist academics (everyone knows they're full of shit). It is another thing to quote (paraphrase?) a black student's passionate outburst about representation in the university, and then patronizingly wonder for the rest of the book why she is so wrong. Denby's most consistent error is to ridicule the notion that representation matters in the media or in academia.
The worst chapter by far is his reaction to Simone de Beauvoir, where he riffs extensively on "Take Back the Night." Denby listens to the stories of the women who have sufferred rape, and wonders why the ones who come back year after year can never "get over it". He tries to put himself in their shoes, and the furthest he can get is to reminisce (for a second time) about that one time he got mugged. He seems to think that sexual violence is some sort of cultural misunderstanding that might be addressed by rereading The Decameron. Even when he admits to feeling like a creepy uncle, you can't escape the sense that he is utterly, deeply clueless.
Stupid politics, a few good anecdotes, and possibly some reading recommendations. That's what Great Books has to offer. It worked for me in high school, but it's not my thing anymore.
Unfortunately, there is more to this book. Much of it is devoted to Denby's social/political commentary, which might best be described as the ultimate middle class white man's perspective on the culture wars of the 1990s. Not all of it is face-slappingly offensive, and he goes out of his way to present the views he disagrees with. But it is one thing to tweak a few post-modernist academics (everyone knows they're full of shit). It is another thing to quote (paraphrase?) a black student's passionate outburst about representation in the university, and then patronizingly wonder for the rest of the book why she is so wrong. Denby's most consistent error is to ridicule the notion that representation matters in the media or in academia.
The worst chapter by far is his reaction to Simone de Beauvoir, where he riffs extensively on "Take Back the Night." Denby listens to the stories of the women who have sufferred rape, and wonders why the ones who come back year after year can never "get over it". He tries to put himself in their shoes, and the furthest he can get is to reminisce (for a second time) about that one time he got mugged. He seems to think that sexual violence is some sort of cultural misunderstanding that might be addressed by rereading The Decameron. Even when he admits to feeling like a creepy uncle, you can't escape the sense that he is utterly, deeply clueless.
Stupid politics, a few good anecdotes, and possibly some reading recommendations. That's what Great Books has to offer. It worked for me in high school, but it's not my thing anymore.