Delbanco, a Columbia University professor, shows the reader what is so great about American authors such as Herman Melville, Kate Chopin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane and others. I'm not sure that the writing style (sentence complexity and vocabulary, etc)matches the intended audience for this arguement. Seems to me that if you pick up this book and can gather meaning from some its more obtuse sections, you already know why we need to continue to read the "classics".

I tangled with Required Reading in its opening pages. I had thought it was something more like The Lifetime Reading Plan and was dismayed when I thought I had stepped in some hardcore lit crit theory which can be a killjoy. The good news is, that's not what I stepped in. While Required Reading is rather like a capstone seminar and requires a college freshman's acquaintance with literature to really swim far with it, it is as engaging as it is edifying. It reminded me why I chose to major in lit back in school and was never sorry. To others who belong to that great English major diaspora, who find themselves lost among the Grisham worshippers, you can go home again with Delbanco.

The Portable Abraham Lincoln is just that, a small book packed with nothing but Lincoln's words and ideas, from the famous debates with Stephen Douglas to his immortal 2nd Inaguaral Address.

Mixed throughout the speeches are letters, both public and private, which reveal his inner thoughts and animating philosophy. Included is his short and moving letter to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, featured in the movie Saving Private Ryan, which is the most eloquent expression of patriotic grief I have ever read.

The book is organized in themes, from his emergence of a polictian to his writings as Chief Executive and as Commander-in-Chief, and ending up with Fate.

This book is for people who want to go beyond the soundbytes featured in documentaries; it places those famous phrases in the context of the entire speech and the commentary is kept to a minimum, showing respect for the reader.

I first read Moby Dick; or The Whale over thirty years ago and I didn't understand it. I thought I was reading a sea adventure, like Westward Ho! or Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym. In fact, it did start out like an adventure story but after twenty chapters or so, things began to get strange. I knew I was in deep water. It was rough, it seemed disjointed, there were lengthy passages that seemed like interruptions to the story, the language was odd and difficult, and often it was just downright bizarre. I plodded through it, some of it I liked, but I believe I was glad when it ended. I knew I was missing something and I understood that it was in me! It wasn't the book; it was manifestly a great book, but I hadn't the knowledge of literature or experience to understand it.

I read it again a few years later. I don't remember what I thought of it. The third time I read it, it was hilarious; parts of it made me laugh out loud! I was amazed at all the puns Melville used, and the crazy characters, and quirky dialog. The fourth or fifth reading, it was finally that adventure story I wanted in the first place. I've read Moby Dick more times than I've counted, more often than any other book. At some point I began to get the symbolism. Somewhere along the line I could see the structure. It's been funny, awesome, exciting, weird, religious, overwhelming and inspiring. It's made my hair stand on end...

Now, when I get near the end I slow down. I go back and reread the chapters about killing the whale, and cutting him up, and boiling him down. Or about the right whale's head versus the sperm whale's. I want to get to The Chase but I want to put it off. I draw Queequeg with his tattoos in the oval of a dollar bill. I take a flask with Starbuck and a Decanter with Flask. Listen to The Symphony and smell The Try-Works. Stubb's Supper on The Cabin Table is a noble dish, but what is a Gam? Heads or Tails, it's a Leg and Arm. I get my Bible and read about Rachel and Jonah. Ahab would Delight in that; he's a wonderful old man. For a Doubloon he'd play King Lear! What if Shakespeare wrote The Tragedy of The Whale? Would Fedallah blind Ishmael with a harpoon, or would The Pequod weave flowers in The Virgin's hair?

Now I know. To say you understand Moby Dick is a lie. It is not a plain thing, but one of the knottiest of all. No one understands it. The best you can hope to do is come to terms with it. Grapple with it. Read it and read it and study the literature around it. Melville didn't understand it. He set out to write another didactic adventure/travelogue with some satire thrown in. He needed another success like Typee or Omoo. He needed some money. He wrote for five or six months and had it nearly finished. And then things began to get strange. A fire deep inside fret his mind like some cosmic boil and came to a head bursting words on the page like splashes of burning metal. He worked with the point of red-hot harpoon and spent a year forging his curious adventure into a bloody ride to hell and back. "...what in the world is equal to it?"

Moby Dick is a masterpiece of literature, the great American novel. Nothing else Melville wrote is even in the water with it, but Steinbeck can't touch it, and no giant's shoulders would let Faulkner wade near it. Melville, The pale Usher, warned the timid: "...don't you read it, ...it is by no means the sort of book for you. ...It is... of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it. Warn all gentle fastidious people from so much as peeping into the book..." But I say if you've never read it, read it now. If you've read it before, read it again. Think Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Goethe, and The Bible. If you understand it, think again.

It's always dangerous to label a book as a "masterpiece": that word seems to scare away most readers and distances everyone from the substance of the book itself. Still, I'm going to say that this is the Greatest American Novel because I really think that it is--after having read it myself.

Honestly, Moby Dick IS long and looping, shooting off in random digressions as Ishmael waxes philosophical or explains a whale's anatomy or gives the ingredients for Nantucket clam chowder--and that's exactly what I love about it. This is not a neat novel: Melville refused to conform to anyone else's conventions. There is so much in Moby Dick that you can enjoy it on so many completely different levels: you can read it as a Biblical-Shakespearean-level epic tragedy, as a canonical part of 19th Century philosophy, as a gothic whaling adventure story, or almost anything else. Look at all the lowbrow humor. And I'm sorry, but Ishmael is simply one of the most likable and engaging narrators of all time.

A lot of academics love Moby Dick because academics tend to have good taste in literature. But the book itself takes you about as far from academia as any book written--as Ishmael himself says, "A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard." Take that advice and forget what others say about it, and just experience Moby Dick for yourself.

Why review Moby Dick? Hasn't enough been said?

If you've not read this novel yet, then obviously not. Don't miss it.

The average reader today will be put off by what seems to be a laborious 19th Century style. Long words are assembled into long sentences, there's not always a lot of dialogue, and not a single glib pop culture reference. Surely a dated work.

Here are a few secrets -- you won't find these heavily discussed -- to help you read this novel:

1) It's the first modernist work. Yes, though it looks old-fashioned, "Moby Dick" is anything but. The whole novel is conscious of the fact that it's a novel -- Melville assembles bits of other works (real or imagined) and plays with form in a way we normally think of as the contribution of later writers.

2) It's got rhythm. The book moves from action piece to digression back to action in a regular pattern. The tempo of the novel itself suggests the motion of a ship on the sea. So when you're reading one of the long digressive passages, remember that it's just there to rest you up.

3) It's funny. Why doesn't anyone mention this? It's true the book concerns some serious themes -- it's not just a whaling novel -- but Melville has a sense of humor. The whole of the novel is over the top with solemnity and scholarliness. If you think he's entirely serious, you're being far too literal minded.

So take your time, don't be put off. Melville has an odd style, but once you recognize that it's deliberate, you'll see he has a sense of playfulness. Enjoy.

I have not read Delbanco's other work on Puritanism, but judging by his gloss of the subject in The Real American Dream-, I am not sure I would. I bought the book based on its endorsement from Richard Rorty, an intellectual I admire and take quite seriously. But Delbanco does not seem to sincerely engage with modes of Christian thought in a way that that Rorty would, This I find disappointing.

Delbanco selects examples of evangelical excessiveness and perversion to depict the heart of early Puritanical thinking. This I find poor. Instead of real scholarship on the issue, in a way that George Marsden exhibits in his work on American religious history, Delbanco is content to perpetuate, even elevate popular stereotypes of early American Christianity. If this kind of whimsical and polemical gloss were constructed about Islam or Buddhism, there would surely be some kind of backlash.

For example, on pages 28 and 29, Delbanco addresses the Congregationalist style of "public profession" of faith. After merely mentioning the practice, he immediately goes into an anecdote about how such an experience nearly drove a woman insane. He did admit the she probably suffered from bi-polar disease, but what is his point? Is that his message about the history of Congregationalism? Delbanco paints all of mainstream American faith as if it were a fringe cult on the evening news.

After having read this section, I come away feeling like I have been given a series of anecdotes from a liberal academic that feels so comfortable in his disdain for Christian thought he need not be penetrating or thorough, merely offhand and dismissive. And this approach is no doubt acceptable to most readers, but not all.

I recommend reading this book, but more as a novel of hope. It has an important subject and penetrating insights about the American condition we all experience.

Anyone wondering what makes this country tick will find a fascinating thesis contained in just 100 readable pages. Obviously the scholarship is deep and thorough, but the thinking is fresh and applicable. (Did you ever wonder why the word 'academic' means 'useless'? This book is just the opposite.) At the end, when Professor Delbanco gets to the present day,though, he seems to run out of steam, and loses some of his clarity. He just kind of ends the book without really drawing the powerful conclusion he's leading to -- but a thought-provoking and important book nonetheless.

Oddly enough, the book is about avoiding depression. But rather than offering the normal remedies (therapy, the correct choice of psychoactive drugs, a regimen of positive thinking) the author believes that some vision of transcendence provided by our shared culture is the only psychological salvation. This vision may be religious in form, as it was for the Puritans, or it may be secularized, as it was from roughly 1850 to the 1960's. Between the late 60's and the 80's "something died, or at least fell dormant"; there is now no vision greater than the self (and he asserts this would imply a social vision, one involving "fellowship and reciprocity"). As a consequence, he believes people nowadays are increasingly depressed, as the term was defined by the likes of Lionel Trilling and Graham Greene.

The books is pitched at a very high level of synthesis, but somehow he pulls it off. It is beautifully written; the sweeping sentences are laden with apt quotations and rich with resonance. The sense of compact assurance falls off a bit at the end as he tries to draw conclusions about our current cultural plight (as he sees it). His is basically a religious sensibility, one he would like to persuade us all people (or at least thinking people) share and all societies need, preferably focussed on increasing justice for everyone, although he's not really sure a purely secular version works, since the secular project seems to have failed. He's engaging in social psychology, relating our current lack of a sustaining social faith to a pervasively sick personal psychology. It's a genre of cultural criticism, very high minded and sincere. But many people are oblivious to this genre and even manage to live meaningful or at least happy lives without experiencing the sense of insulated selfhood and anomie that he describes. Some might be better off if they did, and one of the satisfactions of reading such a book is the feeling that "I, at least, share this refined and ennobling sensitivity." Unfortunately, many readers, whether oblivious or ennobled, will not be persuaded to energize the admirable liberal social values he affirms by the argument that they are a cure for their own psychological ills.

[...]
So we reach the denouement, and Mr. Delbanco describes the previous world--in which we still had imagination, rather than pure reason--but
then concludes :

Although there would be a certain satisfaction in living imaginatively in such a world, on balance it is probably a good thing
that we have lost it forever. Whether we welcome or mourn this loss, it is the central and irreversible fact of modern history
that we no longer inhabit a world of transcendence. The idea that man is a receptor of truth from God has been relinquished,
and replaced with the idea that reality is an unstable zone between phenomena (unknowable in themselves) and innumerable
fields of mental activity (which we call persons) by which they are apprehended. These apprehensions are expressed through
language, which is always evolving, and which constitutes the only reality we recognize. Our world exists in the ceaseless
movement of human consciousness, a process in which the reception of new impressions is indistinguishable from the production
of new meanings: 'mind's willful transference of nature, man, and society--and eventually of God, and finally of mind itself--
into itself.'

Where Mr. Delbanco had begun by telling us "we cannot do without some conceptual means for thinking about the sorts of experiences that
used to go under the name of evil," now he tells us that instead :

[T]he story I have tried to tell is the story of the advance of secular rationality in the United States, which has been relentless
in the face of all resistance. It is the story of a culture that has gradually withdrawn its support from the old conception of a
universe seething with divine intelligence and has left its members with only one recourse: to acknowledge that no story about
the intrinsic meaning of the world has universal validity.

From here on, things get really muddled, as having just surrendered to a worldview that even he has acknowledged leaves us with a gaping
void in our lives and fuels our inhumanity toward one another, we next find him telling us that the "party of secular humanism, of which I
consider myself a member, has deluded itself into believing that human beings can manage without any metaphor at all" and then that "the idea
of evil is not just a metaphor that 'some people find...useful'; it is a metaphor upon which the health of society depends."

This really leaves him no other option but to try and construct a secular metaphor for evil. Tellingly, he turns to (and apparently misinterprets)
St. Augustine for help. He says that St. Augustine rejected the idea that evil could be objectified (as Satan or as some other person or group of
people), and instead identified evil as 'an essential nothingness.' Mr. Delbanco has decided that the "nothingness" of which this version of evil
consists is a kind of absence of sufficient love for others in our own hearts. Of course, the objections to this idea are too numerous to address
completely, but a few will do. First, having rejected the idea of universal truths, how does Mr. Delbanco decide what actions are evil to begin
with? What is wrong with the Holocaust or the Killing Fields or Jim Crow if there are no universally valid meanings of good and evil?
Second, note that by defining evil as an absence of something you, in effect, deny the existence of evil. The lack of something can not be that
thing. Hunger is the lack of food, not the absence of hunger. Third, when St. Augustine spoke of evil as a lack of something he didn't mean
some generic kind of thing, but the absence of good, or godliness. Unfortunately for Mr. Delbanco, when he earlier in the book disposed of
universal truths and of evil, he necessarily threw the concept of good away too. Fourth, the very essence of the story of Man's Fall is that evil
lurks within us all. Strongly held religious beliefs may sometimes lead to unfortunate prejudices, and they will necessarily lead us to harsh, but
often just, judgments about the behavior and beliefs of others, but Judeo-Christian (which is to say American) religious beliefs also recognize
the evil that is an immutable part of our own souls. In the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn :

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them
from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart.

In his purblind secular humanist resistance to even his own analysis, Mr. Delbanco simply can not admit the power, never mind the truth, of
the Judeo-Christian metaphor, that Man is Fallen, and has within him not only the capacity but the barely controlled (and not always
controlled) desire to do evil to his fellow men. It is important too to note that this metaphor lies at the heart of conservatism but must be utterly
rejected by liberalism, for if Man is not essentially good, then, all things being equal, he can not be trusted to behave well, as all philosophies
of the Left assume that he will. Mr. Delbanco's political philosophy lies smoldering in the same ash heap as his attempted metaphor.

And so, Mr. Delbanco concludes :

My driving motive in writing [this book] has been the conviction that if evil, with all the insidious complexity which
Augustine attributed to it, escapes the reach of our imagination, it will have established dominion over us all. ...
I have felt compelled to insist that Satan, always receding and always sought after, has had two very different meanings
in our history. Sometimes he has been used for the purpose of construing the other as a monster, and sometimes...he
has been a symbol of our own deficient love, our potential for envy and rancor toward creation. Since the experience
of evil will not go away, one or the other of these ways of coping with it sooner or later always comes back.

The former way--evil as the other--is, at least at first, physically rewarding. The latter way--evil as privation--is much more
difficult to grasp. But it offers something that the devil himself could never have intended: the miraculous paradox of
demanding the best of ourselves.

As near as I can tell, the suggestion here is that the religious metaphor for evil gives us racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, etc., but that
his secular metaphor shows us that all we really need is more--more love, more stuff, more whatever... In the end, Mr. Delbanco has achieved
nothing more than to bring us back to where we started. Having started out by telling us that we can't exist without having a framework by
which we understand evil, he ends by offering one that, though compatible with his science, is totally inadequate to our needs.

Mr. Delbanco is fond of citing examples from popular culture, but there's one artifact that he's somehow missed : The Exorcist. It's absence
from this book is particularly noticeable because his predicament so resembles that of the hero. If you'll recall, Father Damian has lost his faith
in God, but is suddenly confronted by a monstrous evil. As he gradually comes to believe that the evil is a manifestation of Satan, so too is he
able to once again believe in God, and this gives him the strength of will to defeat the evil. In a strange way, it takes acceptance of the
antithesis to restore his faith in the thesis.

But really, it's not so strange; if you accept that evil is real, how can you not accept that good is real? And if pure reason suggests that these
are merely words, just definitions and not realities, but every fiber of your being tells you that they exist and that you can differentiate the one
from the other and that one is preferable to the other, then who will not choose to believe and who will not choose good over evil? And having
just this once chosen to doubt the efficacy of reason and its baneful cosmogony, mightn't we eventually be willing to make a kind of Pascal's
Wager and once again embrace the transcendent wisdom of the religious metaphor, despite its superstitious taint? If subjecting ourselves to
the thralldom of reason leaves us abandoned in a world that we find atavistic and repulsive, mightn't we choose to view reason as a useful but
limited tool, ultimately incapable of explaining existence or our purpose in life to our satisfaction? It may be true that the "beliefs" that most of
us hoi polloi share and upon which Western Civilization was erected are not an option for the "thinking people" with whom Mr. Delbanco
consorts, but if he is so unhappy with the option they've chosen instead, perhaps the problem lies not in our "beliefs" but in their "thinking".

GRADE : C

This book was obviously titled to sell books and not explain what the book is about. First the book talks about the history of slavery in the United States. The author seems to talk forever about slavery. From this point the author talks in circles about the blame game. Since our society does not believe in the devil as we once did, we have diseases and disfunctions to blame for the evil we do. The author is right in his presumption that people people look for and need a scapegoat. The author argues that satan served as one easy scapegoat for all that is wrong with the world. The rules of socirty have went askew since Satan died. As a result the author argues we hunger to get the devil back. Because the book talks in circles for so long about the same vaguely realted points, I would only recommend this book as a paperweight or a reference for hardcore fans on the subject.

This book takes an interesting look at the way in which the modern world has steadily lost its fear of perpetual damnation since we have begun to pull ourselves out of the pit of a lost history. And, in some regard, Delbanco's thesis holds strong. He points out that the loss of fear and belief in the idea or actuality of Satan (depending on how you look at it) has steadily lost its power since the pilgrims landed on the proverbial Plymouth Rock. This book looks at various ideas about fear, evil and modern cynicism, and it leaves the reader with a choice that seems somewhat miniscule at first, but monumental in the long run: What are we to believe about a concept of evil when our Norh American culture works so hard to rid the world of it? Delbanco points to the rise in trully horrific and violent forms of entertainment in the past century.

Overall, it's a great book, with a lot of insight into who we are. Probably, it will be better recieved by religious liberals than cynics and fanatics.

this is one of my favorite Emerson works. It opens itself up to so much, talking about his theories of influence, precursing everything from queer theory and gender transitivity to Harold Bloom, and it is a poem, too. It's beautiful. It offers his thoughts on the most diverse materials, gets into the most detail on his Hindu readings, gets very brave in "Swedenborg." But ... for a 165-page book? Delbanco's intro is boring and useless. Don't even READ it before you read the book. It'll be like watching an educational video on yeast infections before watching a porno. The index is a kind of neat feature; it's cool to see how many men are mentioned how many times. For example, the most obvious 'omission' in the book, JESUS, is mentioned only 5 times in the book, but he lurks throughout in so many ways. I love the book, but think the edition is a huge ripoff. However, it is difficult to find all these essays in one volume without buying a "complete works" or something, and they are ALL good and work together as a complete 'book,' one essay building off the prior in subject and time, going from B.C. to the nineteenth century, from Plato to Napoleon and Goethe.