Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

There are ebbs and flows in one's reading life. Sometimes there are dry patches where you simply can't find a book that matches your mood or interests. You have adequate reads but nothing that really grips you.

And then there are times when you will have a series of home-runs. You keep coming across, as if by accident, books that answer questions you are asking or give you information you are seeking. Authors who are thinking along similar paths as you are, maybe approaching it differently or arriving at somewhat variant conclusions but whose thoughts help hone your own.

I have had a good past eighteen months with a sequence of books on different topics every month or two that do exactly that. Books that I can wrestle with, that I can tell even as I read them are going to influence my thinking; that will give me not only new information but force me to look at something from a perspective I had not considered before.

The most recent diamond was entirely serendipitous. I found Neil Postman's Building a Bridge to the 18th Century in a used bookstore and, thinking it was an essay about a philosophical/historical connection between our current circumstances and the intellectual ecosystem of the 18th century, I purchased it even though I was unfamiliar with Postman's work.

What a break. With that title I might have gone either way on the give-this-book-a-home decision. A brief biography of Neil Postman is at Wikipedia. Having just discovered him, I find that he actually passed away in 2003. That is one of the pitfalls of used bookstores - sometimes you fall behind. Postman appears to be one of those intellectual iconoclasts with which New York City has so often been blessed, carving out his own distinctive intellectual path. He appears to have travelled from the rollickingly innovative and even revolutionary to a more settled respect for continuity with the past.

A number of his books have been either best sellers and/or highly influential, including Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985 dealing with the influence of television on communication), Technopoly (1992), The End of Education (1995), and The Disappearance of Childhood (1982). Building a Bridge to the 18th Century was Postman's last book and is actually a distillation of over thirty years of thinking and writing. The chapters (Progress, Technology, Language, Information, Narratives, Children, Democracy, and Education) are really a series of Montaignesque interlinked meditations, building on and bringing up to date the core ideas of all his earlier works.

I highly recommend Building a Bridge to the 18th Century as a distinctly relevant, very thought provoking and always entertaining disquisition on topics near and dear to parents and any thinking citizen. I also would recommend this for YA readers in eleventh and twelfth grade who are taking technology courses, media studies, and most especially philosophy. There is a lot of grist for young mills in this book.