What Jacques Barzun Believes, Maybe

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I share fully the pleasure that our reviewer, John J. Reilly, takes in Jacques Barzun's big new book From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (FT, November). It is a very big book indeed, coming to almost nine hundred pages with notes. But it is a wonderful read, summing up the learned and sometimes eccentric reflections of a scholar now ninety-three years old. Anne Fadiman has written, "Thank heaven he has lived long enough to complete a book no one else could even have begun." The second part of that is a bit of an exaggeration. John Russell writes with no exaggeration at all, "This book is what used to be called a `liberal education,' and it should bring that phrase back into favor."

That Professor Barzun is learned, cosmopolitan, amusing, and wise there is no doubt, but I kept wondering …