Jedediah Purdy is only in his mid-20s, but there are times when, working your way through Purdy's precisely crafted sentences, you would swear that the author is an old man. The problem with the world today, Purdy says, is that too many of us have withdrawn from it. "Often it begins in ironic avoidance," he writes, "the studied refusal to trust or hope openly. Elsewhere it comes from reckless credulity, the embrace of a tissue of illusions bound together by untested hope." He urges a revitalization of the notion of public responsibility, "the active preservation of things that we must hold in common or, eventually, lose altogether." Purdy is well aware that politics, the most visible of the public arenas, is nowadays regarded as a training ground for opportunists and hypocrites. But he insists that if we invest our lives with a dignity rooted in "the harmony of commitment, knowledge, and work," even politics might be restored.

For Common Things is quick to make pronouncements along the lines of "Today's young people are adept with phrases that reduce personality to symptoms," without mentioning that it was their therapy-happy baby boomer parents who introduced words like passive-aggressive and repressed into their vocabulary--and without broaching the possibility that it was the combined failure of the '60s counterculture movement and the loss of faith in government attendant to the Watergate scandal that nurtured cynicism and ironic detachment within the boomers. (Well, perhaps solving the problem is more important than assigning the blame.) At times, the Harvard-educated author's erudition gets the best of him, and his prose takes on a certain academic stiffness. (One wonders, at such moments, if perhaps the book has its roots in a senior thesis.) But when Purdy focuses on personal matters related to his homeschooled West Virginia upbringing, one can detect traces of a passion and intensity that would be well worth developing in future writings. Which is not to say that Purdy doesn't feel strongly about the restoration of civic commitment; this book stands as proof that he does. But anybody can--and many people do--make impersonal assessments of the state of the world; there is a story, however, that only Jedediah Purdy can tell us about community and responsibility. The traces of that story in For Common Things may leave many readers clamoring for more details. --Ron Hogan


From Publishers Weekly
What could a 24-year-old Harvard graduate home-schooled by his "back-to-the-land" parents in rural West Virginia possibly have to say about the American soul? Much that is worth heeding. Purdy calls his book "a defense of love letters," noting that such letters "indicate a certain kind of courage, a willingness to stake oneself on an expression of hope that may very well come to nothing." Here, he expresses his hope for the public life of America. His enemy is the irony that he feels pervades our culture, a culture in which "even in solitary encounters with nature... we reluctant ironists realize that our pleasure in these places and the thoughts they stir in us have been anticipated by a thousand L.L. Bean catalogues." Whether writing about the coal industry's depredations in Appalachia or about the narrowing of politics (no one dares talk about a Great Society anymore), PurdyAlike the masters whose sturdy prose he emulates, from Thoreau to Wendell BerryAdisplays an acute awareness of the connection between private and public virtue. Purdy has an unerring ear for how language, and thus the expression of humanity, has been degraded, whether by political rhetoric, ad-speak or the way that sitcoms present the self. His book is inspiring in its thoughtfulness, in its commitment to the idea that politics should be about more than divvying up the pie and in the care with which it is written. The ideas expressed aren't complicated, but Purdy grapples with them with a seriousness that puts more seasonedAand ironicAcommentators to shame. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
This work stands as a highly personal call for greater individual involvement in American political and public life, despite the collective cynicism of modern times. Purdy, currently a student at Yale University, sees modern mass media and elite schools as dominated by an ironic, detached view of the world. This view plus the general disillusionment in public institutions as a whole and government in particular fosters a narrow, self-serving attitude among too many people. Modern technology such as computers, home video players, and genetic engineering contains the potential for additional individual isolation from the larger society and the gradual shrinking of the public sphere. Purdy draws from numerous sources to make his point, ranging from Montaigne to Seinfeld" to emblematic 1990s periodicals such as Wired and Fast Company. He closes with a plea for a public-oriented society with realistic limits on private excesses. Though well written, well argued, and admirably passionate, Purdy's book finally adds little to the discussion on the future course of modern society. For larger public and academic libraries.AStephen L. Hupp, Urbana Univ. Lib., OH Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, David Glenn
Purdy argues that if we want to heal our national malaise, we should look toward the civic virtues of his parents' world: attentiveness, honesty, devotion to place.


From Booklist
Recent college grad Purdy directs this ruminative discourse at his age cohort. Will they read it? Or will they continue to subscribe to Gen X^-oriented magazines he criticizes, such as Wired and Fast Company. To Purdy, such publications symbolize a self-centered obsession with self-advancement. The under-35 society disdains public spiritedness, agape that their boomer elders ever thought change could come through politics. Purdy's initial discussion prompts one to expect a diagnosis of this turn of events and prescriptions for palliatives, but the concrete world rarely intrudes here (an exception being coal mining's environmental ravaging of West Virginia). Philosophizing on the public weal instead, Purdy delves into Montaigne, Rousseau, and the anti-Communist intellectuals of pre-1989 Eastern Europe. Although Purdy's plea to drain politics of irony and disbelief may be important, his humorless, self-serious presentation carries more the tone of a term paper than that with-it attitude that could snag the Wired readers he's worried about--yet his essay will gain traction with the audience of C-SPAN and NPR, where he'll be discussing his book. Gilbert Taylor


From Kirkus Reviews
With this, his first book, Purdy, at age 24, emerges as a fresh and vibrant voice, calling for the renewal of commitment to and faith in American civic and political life. The dominant personal manner in America today is irony, a bemused detachment from both the self and the very idea of common cooperation, aspirations, or projects; Seinfeld is everyman. Yet, while irony certainly insulates us from failure and disappointment, we continue, maintains Purdy, to long for a sense of wholeness, commitment, and real values. Once, such things could be found in politics, but Promethean dreams of social perfection and transformation are as extinct as the Soviet Union, and politics is now widely viewedoften for good reasonas a place for self-serving hypocrisy. So to find meaning we escape into what is unreal, into beliefs that guardian angels look out for us, into delusions of ``the business-man-as-hero,'' of computer hacks as the boundless, limitless masters of cyberspace. But as the author carefully explains, these are all self-defeating fantasies; they are bound to disappoint, bound to drive us back to where we started, irony. He suggests instead reality, the sloppy, not always easy or successful reality of civic life. We need to care for those things that ``must be common if they are to be at all'': a justice system that is indeed just, an economy that works and is fair, a natural world that might persist beyond our own generation. Although the author himself does at times take on the proselytizing tone of the fantasy purveyors he decries, this is above all a realistic message. Its not manifesto for revolution but, more modestly, a simple call for tending to human possibilities that in their frailty are in danger of being lost. Conservative in his respect for tradition, progressive in his calls for change, Purdy offers original insights by and for a generation that is too little heard from, or perhaps listened to. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Beautifully written, erudite, unpretentious and, most of all, earnest."--Newsday

"Purdy deserves high praise for vindicating the belief that civic engagement can still be meaningful, important and authentic."--Boston Book Review

"The kind of book one finds recommending unreservedly to friends, colleagues, and neighbors."--The Christian Science Monitor


Review
"Beautifully written, erudite, unpretentious and, most of all, earnest."--Newsday

"Purdy deserves high praise for vindicating the belief that civic engagement can still be meaningful, important and authentic."--Boston Book Review

"The kind of book one finds recommending unreservedly to friends, colleagues, and neighbors."--The Christian Science Monitor


Book Description
Jedediah Purdy calls For Common Things his "letter of love for the world's possibilities." Indeed, these pages--which have already garnered a flurry of attention among readers and in the media--constitute a passionate and persuasive testament to the value of political, social, and community reengagement. Drawing on a wide range of literary and cultural influences--from the writings of Montaigne and Thoreau to the recent popularity of empty entertainment and breathless chroniclers of the technological age--Purdy raises potent questions about our stewardship of civic values.

Most important, Purdy offers us an engaging, honest, and bracing reminder of what is crucial to the healing and betterment of society, and impels us to consider all that we hold in common.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Jedediah Purdy calls For Common Things his "letter of love for the world's possibilities." Indeed, these pages constitute a passionate and persuasive testament to the value of--and pressing need for--civic reengagement. Informed by a wide range of cultural and literary influences, from the works of Montaigne and Thoreau to the popularity of empty entertainment to the breathless chroniclers of an exploding technological age, Purdy raises potent questions about our stewardship of civic values. He argues for a return to responsibility for the environment, education, culture, law, and government, and paints a vivid and convincing picture of the contemporary cynicism and malaise that infect policymaking and public discourse.

A Harvard graduate who was home schooled in rural West Virginia, Purdy offers us an engaging, honest, and bracing reminder of what is crucial to the healing and betterment of society, and impels us to consider all that we hold in common.

FROM THE CRITICS

Caleb Crain

In the first paragraph of his introduction, the author of For Common Things invokes the ambition at the heart of American philosophy: "to achieve...what Emerson's friend Henry David Thoreau called 'an original relation to the universe.'" Grand, mighty, famous words. They happen, however, to have been written by Thoreau's friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Meet Jedediah Purdy: 24, photogenic, sonorous and out of his depth. He comes equipped with a personal myth. Before he went to Harvard, he was home-schooled in West Virginia, where, unlike every other child in human history, he did not resent having to do chores. When asked or when "moved to," he dug the potatoes, fed the horses, milked the cows and skinned and gutted his pet steers. For recreation, he arranged wildflowers in his sister's hair and "slathered" mud on his naked body. Purdy was not taught, per se; he was "freed...to learn at home."

Now, it is one of the advantages of a traditional education that children who suck up to adults too cravenly are methodically cornered and beaten by their peers. Perhaps because he never enjoyed this behavior modification, Purdy seems to have internalized his parents' boilerplate unhindered. He has grown up to write a book of intellectual-fogy porn. In his bangs and cotton sweater with no shirt, he is gosh-darn wistful that the phrase "change the world" can "no longer be spoken without a reluctant irony." He identifies Michel de Montaigne as a "sixteenth-century Frenchman" and "the inventor of the essay in its modern form," as if in hopes of a pat on the head. He takes a dim view of newfangled things like Internet capitalism and genetic engineering, and he quotes W.E. Henley's "Invictus" ("I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul") earnestly. He also quotes "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold, "Mending Wall" by Robert Frost, and "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" by W.H. Auden. Fine touchstones all, and not a one of them would make Norman Podhoretz uncomfortable.

It made me a little uncomfortable, however, to watch Purdy dragoon Auden into a campaign against Jerry Seinfeld. Seinfeld is "irony incarnate," Purdy warns, and as Auden said of Yeats, Seinfeld has become his admirers. No doubt he is now a whole climate of opinion, even. Irony is bad, Purdy explains, because "the point of irony is a quiet refusal to believe in the depth of relationships, the sincerity of motivation, or the truth of speech." Sounds pretty diabolical, this irony, which Purdy has a little trouble defining. He confuses it with sarcasm, cynicism, skepticism, narcissism, materialism and despair. Perhaps it's hard for him to track something so unfamiliar. After all, there was none of this lubricity of words and things in West Virginia, where he ate the cows he named.

Irony, of course, has limits, and all the best ironists know it. As Donald Barthelme once noted, "Irony is...destructive and what Kierkegaard worries about a lot is that irony has nothing to put in the place of what it has destroyed." It is no help to faith, and it's an impediment to empathy, as David Foster Wallace acknowledged in Infinite Jest: "An ironist in a Boston AA meeting is a witch in church. Irony-free zone. Same with sly disingenuous manipulative pseudo-sincerity."

Purdy, unfortunately, has not dislodged irony with faith. He has dislodged it with sly disingenuous manipulative pseudo-sincerity. Here is his thesis: Long ago, politics was "Promethean" -- that is, it aspired to "bring about basic changes in the human predicament." But then we lost Vietnam, Nixon resigned, the Berlin Wall fell and affirmative action floundered. Nowadays not even socialists find grand politics appealing. Nursing their wounds, good people right and left have retreated from the public sphere. They have insulated themselves from despair with a culture of irony, and they have abandoned politics as suitable only for therapeutic gestures and petty struggles for power. As a remedy, Purdy argues, we should learn to appreciate the value of politics with humble aspirations, like his mother's service on the local school board. "Precisely this kind of invaluable banality sustains our human world."

Humility is not a bad sermon, as sermons go. But it doesn't merit a book -- certainly not a book this treacly and disorganized. And despite his preaching, Purdy himself is no more humble than Uriah Heep and just as nasty. For example, in an attack on New Age delusions, he writes, "It is worth noting, however trivial it may seem, that the same cars whose bumpers announce 'Magic Happens' are likely to sport the slogan 'Mean People Suck.'" Well, no, it isn't worth noting, and it's snide. Along the way, Purdy also condescends to psychiatric medication ("pills to help people feel at home with any old thing"), identity politics, a fellow Harvard grad ("a warm young man"), management gurus, belief in angels and "plastic surgeons, gossip columnists, and unscrupulous tax attorneys." He devotes a weird amount of energy to attacking the magazines Wired and Fast Company for failing to achieve an original relation to the universe. Wired, he reveals in high dudgeon, is consumerist.

Purdy is not a disciplined thinker. Strip mining reminds him of integrity, which reminds him of Czeslaw Milosz's essays about Communist intellectuals. "Mending Wall" reminds him of neighborhood, which reminds him of genetic engineering. At the end of the book, struggling to come full circle, he returns to America's philosophical tradition. "Emerson distinguished in public and intellectual life between 'the party of memory and the party of hope,'" Purdy writes, finishing himself off better than he knows, because Emerson didn't write those words. "The party of memory and the party of hope" is Richard Rorty's eloquent paraphrase.

Actually, the Transcendentalists would have hated Purdy's ideal of humble political engagement. As Emerson half-complained in a lecture on the tribe, Thoreau and his ilk preferred to "hold themselves aloof." "They are not good citizens, not good members of society," Emerson wrote. "They do not even like to vote." They were, in other words, ironic. — Salon

Publishers Weekly

What could a 24-year-old Harvard graduate home-schooled by his "back-to-the-land" parents in rural West Virginia possibly have to say about the American soul? Much that is worth heeding. Purdy calls his book "a defense of love letters," noting that such letters "indicate a certain kind of courage, a willingness to stake oneself on an expression of hope that may very well come to nothing." Here, he expresses his hope for the public life of America. His enemy is the irony that he feels pervades our culture, a culture in which "even in solitary encounters with nature...we reluctant ironists realize that our pleasure in these places and the thoughts they stir in us have been anticipated by a thousand L.L. Bean catalogues." Whether writing about the coal industry's depredations in Appalachia or about the narrowing of politics (no one dares talk about a Great Society anymore), Purdy--like the masters whose sturdy prose he emulates, from Thoreau to Wendell Berry--displays an acute awareness of the connection between private and public virtue. Purdy has an unerring ear for how language, and thus the expression of humanity, has been degraded, whether by political rhetoric, ad-speak or the way that sitcoms present the self. His book is inspiring in its thoughtfulness, in its commitment to the idea that politics should be about more than divvying up the pie and in the care with which it is written. The ideas expressed aren't complicated, but Purdy grapples with them with a seriousness that puts more seasoned--and ironic--commentators to shame. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This work stands as a highly personal call for greater individual involvement in American political and public life, despite the collective cynicism of modern times. Purdy, currently a student at Yale University, sees modern mass media and elite schools as dominated by an ironic, detached view of the world. This view plus the general disillusionment in public institutions as a whole and government in particular fosters a narrow, self-serving attitude among too many people. Modern technology such as computers, home video players, and genetic engineering contains the potential for additional individual isolation from the larger society and the gradual shrinking of the public sphere. Purdy draws from numerous sources to make his point, ranging from Montaigne to Seinfeld" to emblematic 1990s periodicals such as Wired and Fast Company. He closes with a plea for a public-oriented society with realistic limits on private excesses. Though well written, well argued, and admirably passionate, Purdy's book finally adds little to the discussion on the future course of modern society. For larger public and academic libraries.--Stephen L. Hupp, Urbana Univ. Lib., OH Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

With this, his first book, Purdy, at age 24, emerges as a fresh and vibrant voice, calling for the renewal of commitment to and faith in American civic and political life. The dominant personal manner in America today is irony, a bemused detachment from both the self and the very idea of common cooperation, aspirations, or projects; Seinfeld is everyman. Yet, while irony certainly insulates us from failure and disappointment, we continue, maintains Purdy, to long for a sense of wholeness, commitment, and real values. Once, such things could be found in politics, but Promethean dreams of social perfection and transformation are as extinct as the Soviet Union, and politics is now widely viewed—often for good reason—as a place for self-serving hypocrisy. So to find meaning we escape into what is unreal, into beliefs that guardian angels look out for us, into delusions of "the business-man-as-hero," of computer hacks as the boundless, limitless masters of cyberspace. But as the author carefully explains, these are all self-defeating fantasies; they are bound to disappoint, bound to drive us back to where we started, irony. He suggests instead reality, the sloppy, not always easy or successful reality of civic life. We need to care for those things that "must be common if they are to be at all": a justice system that is indeed just, an economy that works and is fair, a natural world that might persist beyond our own generation. Although the author himself does at times take on the proselytizing tone of the fantasy purveyors he decries, this is above all a realistic message. It's not manifesto for revolution but, more modestly, a simple call for tending to human possibilitiesthat in their frailty are in danger of being lost. Conservative in his respect for tradition, progressive in his calls for change, Purdy offers original insights by and for a generation that is too little heard from, or perhaps listened to. (Author tour)