I’m OK, but who tipped the chariots of the purpose-driven cheese eunuch?
Philip Marchand has a column in the Toronto Star about the “must read,” those books that suddenly appear on bookshelves, subways, beaches, and in cocktail party conversations everywhere. Think Tipping Point, think The World is Flat, think The Purpose-Driven Life.
About Passages, the 1976 bestseller by journalist Gail Sheehy, Marchand writes that “for years afterwards I could count on seeing the book whenever I visited an apartment with a brick bookcase. There it would be, right beside the yoga exercise manual. The owners of the book would eventually buy a house and take the book with them, and when they bought their bigger house the book would end up there, too. Perhaps they would try to sell it at a yard sale but would find no takers for it, even at 25 cents. Now the book is about to accompany them to their retirement home. The owners of the book haven’t looked at it for 40 years, but Passages will still haunt their rec-room bookshelf.”
Marchand gives a capsule history of the zeitgeist book and finds that, when it comes to the “must read,” surprisingly little has changed in the last 50 or 60 years.
“Almost all these books are characterized by a certain naiveté,” he writes, “and over time we can see which of today’s zeitgeist books were prescient and which were merely naive. Given a half-century or so, we can look back upon this decade’s crop of Michael Moore’s political rants and Gladwell’s think pieces and determine whether they were worth the original fuss.”
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Read Marchand’s column in the Toronto Star
