This book presents hundreds of beautiful photographs of some of the world's greatest musicians. I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in classical music. It makes a terrific gift!

Auerbach, who has remained in print via his magisterial work Mimesis, also wrote this collection of essays. In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature he manages to approach the scope of the denser Mimesis by addressing, not individual works, but great themes. He addresses some of the key artistic issues of Western literature. This book is literally worth hundreds of other books which attempt to deal with the same issues, but without the profundity, insight, and expository brilliance of Auerbach. Auerbach was one of the great literary scholars of a generation ago, surviving exemplars of which today include a short list such as Theodore Ziolkowski and Harold Bloom. This book should be required reading for anyone embarking on the systematic study of Western literature

Others reviewd this legendary book already. But I have a point to tell: Mimesis not as content but as form. Mimesis, the title of the book comes from latin word, reflection. Traditionary, mimesis is used to analyse the content of text. You can see that kind of approach in Arnold Hauser's 4 volumes of 'The Social History of Art' or Lukacs's aesthetic theory. But that kind of approach mainly inspired by Marxism went out of mode. Alternative approach is the one of Adorno's 'sociology of art'. Adorno's analysis of music is distinct. He insisted that we could detect the totality of society not in content but in the form of text. He himself is the composer and pupil of Schonberg. So he advocated Modernism in this light. At first glance, Modernism could not match to Marxism. But persausively, Adorno showed the opposite case. You can see that kind of approach in the textof Frederic Jameson's 'Marxism and Form'.
Auerbach's approach should be captured in this line. He analysed various Western literary text in the light of form and the social structuer of that time. His point is that we could detect the social structure of that time or totality, in the term of Marxist tradition, not only in content but also in form, or in Auerbach's term, style.

Beginning with episodes in Homer and the Bible, this amazing study concludes by analyzing passages in Woolf and Proust. To echo Rene Wellek's assessment: it is a book of such scope and depth....it combines so many methods so skillfully, it raises so many questions of theory, history and criticism, it displays so much erudition, insight and wisdom.... I returned to this book after being out of graduate school for twenty years (where it was already out of fashion in most English departments but read with care by all students of Comparative literature), and it is so much better this time around. The essay on Fortuna continues to resonate with timely warnings, and what I once admired about "Odysseus' Scar" is even more luminous after my recent rereading of the book.

In the 30 odd years since I read this book it has never been far from my thoughts. It has changed my understanding of how people think and how they look at their world. I cannot do true justice its impact.

We are apt to think that people are the same wherever and whenever they lived. This is probably a legacy of our democratic, universalistic heritage. It is also what gets us in trouble when we get involved abroad in changing other nations and their societies. Auerbach shows us that humankind is not and has not been alike in its thoughts, aspirations and character but has distinctly changed and varied over time and place.

By closely reading, analyzing and comparing texts of different periods through time, the author demonstrates how the structure of language interacts with the structure of thought, how the way one writes delimits ones vision. This is a more radical thought than its converse that the way we think affects how we write. To Auerbach, an early medieval religious writer, because of the way that Late Latin worked, could not think the way a classical author could. This seems intuitively wrong to a person who has knowledge of one language, but if you have ever tried to translate anything beyond the simplest sentence, you can appreciate what Auerbach means. This is one of those books that stay with you for a lifetime.

The academic fashions in literary history often contribute to the fall of many great authors into oblivion. This might be the case of Auerbach. The anthology of articles edited by Lerer is one reminder of the importance of his work. Establishing Auerbach's contributions may be hard due to the little availability of his work in English. Nonetheless, the many articles included explore the basic notions of "figura" and literary history, direct precursors of critics like Harold Bloom. Even though the book is sometimes too especialized, the chapters on the question of literary history (particularly the one referring to periodization) are necessary guides to an in-depth reading of Auerbach. If combined with the reading of Auerbach's masterpiece "Mimesis", the intellectual possibilities are very wide.