For Common Things
   Jedediah Purdy
  1999 Alfred A. Knopf, New York USA
   ISBN: 0375407081


Irony, Trust, and Commitment in America Today. In light of today's raging urban cynicism this book is a plea for continued attention to things that we have been neglecting - public responsibility, preservation of things we hold in common & our personal, social & natural ecologies from which we all draw our sustenance.

Cogent, uncluttered & absorbing thoughts from a centered young man in this modern college world. Drawing on a wide range of sources from Henry David Thoreau to Jerry Seinfeld; from Edmund Burke to Alexis de Tocqueville to the Bible, this little book is all about the health of living in a democracy & the world of nations at large upon this varied & much trammeled planet. That this author was entirely home schooled until the age of 14 gives a certain acute perspective & mental alertness.

In this General Election year Jedediah Purdy writes in The Absence of Politics chapter: “Politics is undignified, disreputable, vaguely ridiculous & thoroughly outmoded. The great achievements of the age belong to the business world, its great pleasures to personal relationships and self-cultivations. Politics is left to tedious, futile crusaders, overgrown children with insatiable egos, and dubious bands of hangers-on. It creates nothing useful, beautiful, or profitable...The appropriate attitude to it is indifference.”

In his chapter on The Practice of the Public this author muses on how words get away from us; how we lose a word & its meaning by over-use. “One of our leading phantoms is the word public. Like many ghosts, it has a distinguished ... heritage. It comes from the Latin publius, the people ... the source of republic, the realm ruled by the people; its homeliest cousin is the beer-serving pub, a shortened version of public house. During the fierce debates of the 1780s over what form the American constitution should take, James Madison and other revolutionary leaders wrote their pamphlets under the pseudonym Publius. The idea of speaking for the public was important enough in the young republic that the most serious and high-minded figures tried to personify the publius; where the public rules in principle, its personification rules in fact...Now that words has lost its realm.”

And so it goes throughout this little tome in fluent examinations of ideas, language & effects. Jedediah Purdy's chapter titles say it all: Avoiding the World; The Law of the Land: Political Choice and Attentiveness; The Neighbor and the Machine: Technology and Responsibility; Irony and Ecstasy.

This is a well-thought out read. It has a splendid Bibliography, a useful Index & something to say. Made me take another look at life here in these United States - how we got to where we are & why.

An impressive first effort!
(09/24/00)

Rebecca