The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780393050943)

Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven't because they seem too daunting? In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise. In her previous book, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children, and that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In this new book, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading.

The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres--fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry--accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter--ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich--preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing.

The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there's no reason you can't read and enjoy Shakespeare's Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the "Great Books" without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre--what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?--and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.

Author: Susan Wise Bauer
ISBN-10: 0393050947
ISBN-13: 9780393050943
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English
Published: 08/17/2003
Pages: 432
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.62lbs
Size: 9.50h x 6.44w x 1.36d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 04/15/2003 pg. 64
Publishers Weekly 07/14/2003 pg. 70
Library Journal 09/01/2003 pg. 165
School Library Journal 12/01/2003 pg. 177
Library Journal 04/15/2003
Library Journal 08/01/2003