Eisendrath’s book is a perfect example of the random process by which a book comes into my hands.  In this case, a book written by a Professor of English and the Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Barnard came to my attention because I asked a good friend who teaches creative writing at a university to send me the reading list for his course.  Lo and behold, Eisendrath’s book headed the list and the Cambridge Public Library provided a copy of this slim volume.

The book is both strange and wonderful, as Eisendrath uses Sir Philip Sydney’s long pastoral romance poem, ‘Arcadia’, as the centerpiece and the fulcrum around which she explores ideas, thoughts, dreams, and her own childhood and family.  Sydney was famous for having struggled between a life of action as a courtier at the court of Elizabeth and a life of contemplation as evidenced in his 800 page poem.  The author calls upon Homer, Petrarch, Cicero, Augustine, Shakespeare’s Lear, Montaigne, Corot’s ‘red hat’, Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Borges, and especially Virginia Woolf who also wrote extensively about Arcadia, to dive deeply into the importance and impact of reading and writing.   In one of her many digressions (in fact, the whole book is a series of digressions!) she includes a photograph of a letter from Giovanni de Verrazzano (of the eponymous bridge) from 1524.   Verrazzano  explored the coast of North America and named the land Arcadia.   Eisendrath moves from Verrazzano in 1524 to the Jewish Austrian literary critic Leo Spitzer who identified a radical change in literary style around the time of Sydney.  From Spitzer we segue into a chapter about Vivian Gordon Harsh, born in 1890 who was the first Black in the Chicago Library System and whose work was fundamental to the Chicago Black Renaissance.  Harsh is commemorated in a Hyde Park neighborhood park where in 2013, a 15 year old girl Hadiya Pendleton, a star Latin pupil in high school, died in a drive by gang shooting.

Perhaps you’re getting the sense that this book is a rich treasure of digression, scholarship, literary criticism, and observations about our contemporary world and one English professor’s life in reading, thinking, and struggling with that w0rld.  It’s not a book that everyone will enjoy, but I loved its erudition, language, allusions, and leaps of thought.  Thank you, Howard for sending it my way.