Manners in Modern Life - Book 47

This is a slim volume of only 85 pages but I figure it is a much more thoughtful and erudite read than say your basic pot boiler crime novel that people include in their 52 Books challenge, so I am going to go ahead and include it in mine.

The full title is Manners in Modern Life; The Poetry of Conduct; The Virtue of Civility. It is written by Mitchell Kalpakgian and published by The Neumann Press. I read this aloud to my 11 and 13 year olds a couple mornings a week over breakfast for the first several weeks of the academic year. It was slightly (or sometimes more than slightly) over their heads but they listened anyway because the ideas were thought-provoking.

Kalpakgian starts with the premise that one thing sorely lacking in modern life is a sense of civility. The old fashioned chivalrous noble kind that makes men magnanimous and gracious and puts them above the fray and partisan bickering. Kalpakgian is an elegant writer who packs a lot of thought and nuance into each sentence. He makes his point compellingly. I enjoyed this book a lot and the need for it is very apparent in this internet time of election strife. Dialogue is full of ugliness, coarseness, vitriol and insults. It's awful to read some of the terrible things people say to each other stuck in their self-righteous rage behind their computer screens. We need a new civility for the modern age for sure. Not too long ago I signed a petition put out by the Knights of Columbus on Civility in America. I have no idea what that might do, but at least someone is trying to promote decent discourse among fellow citizens.

Each chapter takes examples from literature to illustrate some aspect of good manners. For example, The Art of Good Living as illustrated in The Odyssey. Some of the other works of literature Kalpakgian draws from are Don Quixote (chivalry), Pride and Prejudice (false manners) and A Midsummer's Night's Dream (not taking oneself too seriously). The first chapter starts off with The Goops by Gelett Burgess. Becky had never heard of The Goops and she found this chapter funny. In fact she asked me to read it to her several times. Note to self - The three Goop books would make excellent Christmas presents for her!

Sean got a little tired of all the comparisons to literature and began to see them as unrealistic. I tend to get that way too if the comparisons go on too long. It begins to weaken the argument to me if one is always comparing reality to fiction and then finding it coming up short. But I didn't think Kalpakgian overplayed this, he simply uses the events in the different works of literature to parse what's wrong and right in manners and why.

This book comes nicely bound in hardback; a little book of wisdom to treasure.

For more 52 Books in 52 Weeks reviews go here.