Baylor University humanities professor Alan Jacobs's Breaking Bread with the Dead makes a gentle, yet insistent, argument for the "value of paying attention to old books that come from strange times and are written in peculiar language and frankly don't make a whole lot of sense."
Jacobs (The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction) locates what he calls our "sense of defilement"--the idea that consorting with thinkers of the past somehow makes us unclean--in two contemporary phenomena: information overload and social acceleration. Together, these unfortunate features of life in the Internet age require a "rough-and-ready kind of informational triage" that compels us to "learn to reject appeals to our time, and reject them without hesitation or pity." The antidote for this affliction is the quality of "temporal bandwidth," a term he borrows from Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, suggesting that by widening our present, engaging constructively with the past is a way of "simultaneously slowing us down and giving us more freedom of movement. It is a balm for agitated souls."
For a slim volume, Jacobs marshals an impressive body of evidence. One especially powerful story is that of Frederick Douglass, whose speech on July 4, 1852, simultaneously praised and denounced the legacy of the Founding Fathers--a moving example of one man's frank reckoning with a painful past. At a time when many Americans, compelled by tragic events to confront a legacy of racism, are engaged in deep reflection about the meaning of the nation's history, Breaking Bread with the Dead is an exceptionally useful companion for those who want to do so with honesty and integrity. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer