James Atlas (1949–2019)

I found this book at a University Womens book sale last year, stuck it on the shelf and forgot about it. Picked from my bookcase at random recently, I found it richly rewarding in its essays about parents, the "sandwich" generation, getting older, marriage and death, among other things. As a booklover I especially enjoyed the chapter, "Books," where Atlas confesses to an addiction to books, many of which he admires but never reads or finishes. He also admits he no longer feels guilty about show more all the Great Books and classics that he's never read, and what's more, simply doesn't care. I marked a few books he referenced, and looked them up, one being Francis Spufford's The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading. But after looking that one up, it didn't sound like a book I could easily relate to, with its emphasis on fantasy and scifi stuff. But who knows? Maybe I'll try it one day. He also admits having forgotten much of what he read feverishly in his college days, although random lines and quotations will float across his consciousness at times.

Perhaps the chapter that intrigued me most here was the one on "money." I think of Atlas as a reasonably successful writer, who has published several books and worked for The NY Times, The New Yorker, Atlantic, etc. He runs his own publishing house (Atlas and Company), owns an apartment in NYC and a country home in Vermont, and yet he characterizes himself as (and I had to stop, think and chuckle at this) "lower upper middle class." He also dreads paying his bills, particularly all those credit card purchases of stuff he'd even forgotten he'd bought, and seemed resigned to living in debt. So what's with this guy? Can't he manage his money? Or is there simply never enough, no matter how much you make? But then I thought again, of how I'd never heard of James Atlas before reading this book, so maybe he's not so rich after all. I mean even I can publish a book - and have - but I certainly haven't made any money at it, so ...

But I LIKE this guy. A biographer of modest successes, he claims to have failed as a fiction writer, but when I researched the one novel listed among his books, The Great Pretender, it sounded pretty damned interesting. In fact, I think I'll try to read it. This was, all in all, a very thoughtful and extremely well-written book about, well about, to use an overworked cliche, 'the human condition.' Once again, this James Atlas guy is yet another writer I'd love to sit and have coffee with while we talked about books. show less

James Atlas, an editor for The New York Times, no doubt wishing to cash in on the coattails of such as Allen Bloom and Eric D. Hirsch, summarizes what he considers to be the basic debate between the traditionalists (read Great Books and Dead-White- European-Males) and the radicals (read multiculturalists who would have us read gay and Hindu literature) who espouse cultural relativism. His Battle of the Books: The Curriculum Debate in America will not overload your shelves, physically or show more mentally.

Tradition, I suppose, is useful for building stability and creating a reference point from which to examine new ideas, but it seems to me that both sides of the issue miss the point; both sides want to operate in a world exclusive of the other, rather than take the best of both.

Allen Bloom, who started the whole thing, or at least brought the debate into the open, argues that democracy and its desire for equality, really is at fault; that the cultural relativism of the sixties removed us from the traditional values of the "Great Books", which, of course gave us slavery and colonialism. Atlas, who comes down on the side of the "canonists," (those arguing for a traditional canon of reading) -- along with William Bennett -- forget that the classics of today were the radical nonsense of yesterday. Surely a century that has seen genocide and the creation of weapons of universal destruction, can stop to examine the literature of the present in the context of the current century. And, surely, in a world in which all countries must rely on each other, it is useful to examine and understand the history, politics and social milieu of other peoples. After all, Hirsch argues that if we do not all have a common base of knowledge we will not be able to communicate with each other. Surely it becomes important to communicate with other than just ourselves.

Both sides are engaged in a political struggle: the Left wanting more attention paid to the disenfranchised, and the Right fearing the trend away from traditional values. Both sides suffer from an extreme naivete if they believe that excluding the literature of either side will carry the day for their own point of view.
Atlas wanders all over the place, blaming the univerities' "publish or perish" requirement for the decline of scholarship and the trend away from the classics. (How much more can be said about Shakespeare or Milton?) He is a fan of assimilation of other "cultures"; that it's important to maintain the superiority and power and righteousness of the United States of America. (Stand up and salute at this point.) The problem is, of course, that mainstream, white society has never permitted the assimilation of those who look or act differently from their own male WASP society; hence, perhaps, the trend toward valuing uniqueness and values other than those of the Dead White European Males.

Ultimately, I agree with Brumwich, who argues that the real purpose of education is not to transmit a point of view, -- although I see nothing wrong with that -- but to help students to think and make rational choices based on knowledge rather than opinion. Whether we've done that, of course, is a whole other debate. show less

Such a perfect collection. The variation of style and opinions of these writers made this book hard to put down. Even after I finished it I had to go back and reread my favorites. Some make you angry, some make you tear up. All very great works. I only wish I'd read it sooner.

The author is a literary journalist--an editor of NY Times Magazine, Atlantic, and Vanity Fair. He limns the substantive arguments put up by academics for and against The Great Books taught, or not, as the core of higher education.

The outline of the war more or less begins with the introduction of Allan Bloom, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago, and his publication of "The Closing of the American Mind" in 1987. Arthur Schlesinger Jr predicted this book would be another show more half-read best-seller that strikes a momentary nerve, is rarely read through, and "is soon forgotten". [We now see that his prediction, while true, has taken a ghastly turn, with a generation of "revisionist" ideologues only pretending to teach "Great" Books. ]

Atlas takes the trouble to sound out the sides in the war, and ventilates the positions, warts and all. However, it not a view with insight into the real challenge, which is not "teaching", but understanding. Bloom can quote from Socrates' "Apology" and explode Heidegger's "Rektoratsrede" but can he deliver their burdens to a single student? No, he fails utterly. And the barbarians at the gate were not the leftists or the deconstructionists he derides, pointlessly but repeatedly, but the fascists in love with the power of guns and tribal hatreds.

At the end, Atlas agrees with Bloom, and concludes: "Only a nation schooled in basic values--and we're no longer a nation schooled in anything at all--will grasp the negotiation between personal freedom and collective self-interest that is the essence of our American democracy. Those ideas are learned in books. The Great Books. The best that has been thought and said. The canon. Until a few years ago, this was our educational mandate. If it goes, a tradition that we cherished will go with it." show less