Breaking Bread With The Dead

A Spectator Book of the Year It's fashionable to think of the writers of the past as irredeemably tarnished by prejudice. Aristotle despised women. John Milton, the great champion of free speech, wouldn't have granted it to Catholics. Edith Wharton's imaginative sympathies stopped short of her Jewish characters. But what if it is only through the works of such individuals that we can achieve a necessary perspective on the troubles of the present? Join literary scholar Alan Jacobs for a truly nourishing feast of learning. Discover what Homer can teach us about force, what Machiavelli has to say about reading and what Charlotte Brontë reveals about race. Not all the guests are people you might want to invite into your home, but they all bring something precious to the table. In Breaking Bread with the Dead, an omnivorous reader draws us into close and sympathetic engagement with minds across the ages, from Horace to Donna Haraway.

Each October, as the Day of the Dead draws near, Mexican marketsoverflow with decorated breads, fanciful paper cutouts, andwhimsical toy skulls and skeletons. To honor deceased relatives,Mexicans decorate graves and erect home altars. Drawing on a richarray of historical and ethnographic evidence, this volume revealsthe origin and changing character of this celebrated holiday. Itexplores the emergence of the Day of the Dead as a symbol ofMexican and Mexican-American national identity. Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead poses a serious challengeto the widespread stereotype of the morbid Mexican, unafraid ofdeath, and obsessed with dying. In fact, the Day of the Dead, asshown here, is a powerful affirmation of life and creativity.Beautifully illustrated, this book is essential for anyoneinterested in Mexican culture, art, and folklore, as well ascontemporary globalization and identity formation.

"Absolutely splendid . . . essential for understanding why there is so much bad thinking in political life right now." —David Brooks, New York Times How to Think is a contrarian treatise on why we’re not as good at thinking as we assume—but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life. As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper’s, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America’s culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us—political, social, religious—Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we’re doomed to be divided, but because the people involved simply aren’t thinking. Most of us don’t want to think. Thinking is trouble. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is slow, and that’s a problem when our habits of consuming information (mostly online) leave us lost in the spin cycle of social media, partisan bickering, and confirmation bias. In this smart, endlessly entertaining book, Jacobs diagnoses the many forces that act on us to prevent thinking—forces that have only worsened in the age of Twitter, “alternative facts,” and information overload—and he also dispels the many myths we hold about what it means to think well. (For example: It’s impossible to “think for yourself.”) Drawing on sources as far-flung as novelist Marilynne Robinson, basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, British philosopher John Stuart Mill, and Christian theologian C.S. Lewis, Jacobs digs into the nuts and bolts of the cognitive process, offering hope that each of us can reclaim our mental lives from the impediments that plague us all. Because if we can learn to think together, maybe we can learn to live together, too.

In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.

A Christian Perspective on the Joys of Reading Reading has become a lost art. With smartphones offering us endless information with the tap of a finger, it's hard to view reading as anything less than a tedious and outdated endeavor. This is particularly problematic for Christians, as many find it difficult to read even the Bible consistently and attentively. Reading is in desperate need of recovery. Recovering the Lost Art of Reading addresses these issues by exploring the importance of reading in general as well as studying the Bible as literature, offering practical suggestions along the way. Leland Ryken and Glenda Faye Mathes inspire a new generation to overcome the notion that reading is a duty and instead discover it as a delight.

If the whole of the Christian life is to be governed by the "law of love"—the twofold love of God and one's neighbor—what might it mean to read lovingly? That is the question that drives this unique book. Through theological reflection interspersed with readings of literary texts (Shakespeare and Cervantes, Nabokov and Nicholson Baker, George Eliot and W. H. Auden and Dickens), Jacobs pursues an elusive quarry: the charitable reader.

A Santa Fe chef investigates when murder sours her sweet plans for the Day of the Dead in this culinary mystery series debut. Life couldn’t be sweeter for Tres Amigas Café chef Rita Lafitte, decorating sugar skulls and taste-testing rich, buttery pan de muerto in anticipation of Santa Fe’s Day of the Dead bread-baking contest. That is, until her friendly landlord, Victor, is found dead next door. Although the police deem Victor’s death a suicide, Rita knows something is amiss. To uncover the truth, she teams up with her octogenarian boss, Flori, the town’s most celebrated snoop. The duo begins to sift through long-buried secrets and to take full measure of duplicitous neighbors, but the clock is ticking and their list of suspects is growing ever longer. Just as the clues get hotter than a New Mexican chili, one of their main suspects winds up dead. Rita fears that the killer is dishing out seconds—and her order might be up.

The story of an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion, told by a very unlikely convert, Take This Bread tells the story of a restaurant cook and writer who wandered into a church and found herself transformed, setting up a food pantry around the same altar where she first received the body of Christ.