Breaking Bread with the Dead A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

Alan Jacobs, P.J. Ochlan

eAudio - 2020

“At a time when many Americans . . . are engaged in deep reflection about the meaning of the nation's history [this] is an exceptionally useful companion for those who want to do so with honesty and integrity.” —Shelf AwarenessFrom the author of How to Think and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, a literary guide to engaging with the voices of the past to stay sane in the presentW. H. Auden once wrote that "art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise, Breaking Bread with the Dead, Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the strange and wonderful writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present—and increase what Th...omas Pynchon once called our "personal density."Today we are battling too much information in a society changing at lightning speed, with algorithms aimed at shaping our every... more