In this deep and engaging meditation on the usefulness and uselessness of reading in the digital age, Harvard English professor Marjorie Garber aims to reclaim “literature” from the periphery of our personal, educational, and professional lives and restore it to the center, as a radical way of thinking. But what is literature anyway, how has it been understood over time, and what is its relevance for us today? Who gets to decide what the word means? Why has literature been on the defensive since Plato? Does it have any use at all, other than serving as bourgeois or aristocratic accoutrements attesting to one’s worldly sophistication and refinement of spirit? What are the boundaries that separate it from its “commercial” instance and from other more mundane kinds of writing? Is it, as most of us assume, good to read, much less study—and what would that mean?

The past is capricious enough to support every stance - no matter how questionable. In 2002, the Bush administration decided that dealing with Saddam Hussein was like appeasing Hitler or Mussolini, and promptly invaded Iraq. Were they wrong to look to history for guidance? No; their mistake was to exaggerate one of its lessons while suppressing others of equal importance. History is often hijacked through suppression, manipulation, and, sometimes, even outright deception. MacMillan's book is packed full of examples of the abuses of history. In response, she urges us to treat the past with care and respect.

What does drug addiction mean to us? What did it mean to others in the past? And how are these meanings connected? In modern society the idea of drug addiction is a given and commonly understood concept, yet this was not always the case in the past. This book uncovers the original influences that shaped the creation and the various interpretations of addiction as a disease, and of addiction to opiates in particular. It delves into the treatments, regimes, and prejudices that surrounded the condition, a newly emerging pathological entity and a form of 'moral insanity' during the nineteenth century. The source material for this book is rich and surprising. Letters and diaries provide the most moving material, detailing personal struggles with addiction and the trials of those who cared and despaired. Confessions of shame, deceit, misery and terror sit alongside those of deep sensual pleasure, visionary manifestations and blissful freedom from care. The reader can follow the lifelong opium careers of literary figures, artists and politicians, glimpse a raw underworld of hidden drug use, or see the bleakness of urban and rural poverty alleviated by daily doses of opium. Delving into diaries, letters and confessions this book exposes the medical case histories and the physician's mad, lazy, commercial, contemptuous, desperate, altruistic and frustrated attempts to deal with drug addiction. It demonstrates that many of the stigmatising prejudices arose from false 'facts' and semi-mythical beliefs and thus has significant implications, not only for the history of addiction, but also for how we view the condition today.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1827 edition. Excerpt: ...insisted, we conceive that, in an endowed, there is a better mechanism than in an unendowed college, for working off the products of science and sound literature. But if there be a virtue in the worse mechanism to stimulate the better mechanism, and set it more actively agoing; then to the former really, though indirectly, we may have to attribute the high service of raising and sustaining the character of philosophy in our land. It is not difficult to reconcile our preference for endowed universities to the pleasure wherewith we contemplate the rise of a great popular university in the midst of them. The one sentiment is truly the effect of the other. The recent institution will never, we think, outstrip the older ones; but it will urge them onward, so that they shall be perpetually ahead of itself. It will be the impellent cause for advancing and elevating the tone of science, even though a high toned science may never be dispensed from its own lecture-rooms. It will work its greatest good through the medium of Oxford and Cambridge; and, in their ostensible triumph, and its own apparent defeat and inferiority, will an intelligent observer recognize the most substantial proof of the great service it shall have achieved for the nation. 36. There is a bigotry on the side of endowed seminaries which leads those whom it actuates to be jealous of popular institutions. And, on the other hand, there is a generous feeling towards these institutions, which is often accompanied with a certain despite towards the endowed and established seminaries. We think that a more comprehensive consideration of the actings and reactings which take place in society, should serve to abate the heats of this partizanship; and, that what in one view is regarded as...