An Insubstantial Book

The Harvard Guide to Influential Books edited by C. Maury Devine, Claudia M. Dissel and Kim D. Parrish

Harper and Row

304 pages; $18.95 cloth, $7.95 paper

WHAT ARE HARVARD'S best and brightest reading? Which books occupy a special place on their mantles? What makes Matina Horner tick? Enquiring minds like ours want to know.

Not to worry. Thanks to a miracle of modern capitalism, The Harvard Guide to Influential Books will soon reach a bookstore near you.

In the spring of 1985, a trio of students in the Kennedy School's Mid-Career program had a bright idea: ask a bunch of Harvard faculty members what books influenced their thinking and publish the results. Not much work is involved: pass around a few questionnaires; and then call a publisher eager to publish a book plugging other books. The result is this book, a rambling, pretentious mishmash of egoism and insight that is, ultimately, hard to hate.

The Harvard bigwigs were asked "for the titles of four to six books and the reasons why each book came to mind," as the editors write in their introduction. Some big names, including professors Bernard Bailyn, Stephen Jay Gould, John Kenneth Galbraith and Stanley Hoffmann even took the time to respond. Alan Dershowitz is not represented, maybe because respondents were not allowed to list their own works.

THE EDITORS write that they "were not looking for a contrived list of books that made a particular professor look good, but for sincere descriptions of books that truly mattered." They may not have been looking for any contrived lists, but they certainly found some.

Radcliffe President Horner, for instance, cannot resist listing a Dr. Seuss book, The Sneetches, and Other Stories among the books she's loved before. Professor Gould, after telling us how he played stickball as a street-kid in New York City, includes Lucky to Be a Yankee by Joe DiMaggio on his list of great books, following Darwin's The Origin of Species.

Gould also cites the King James version of the Book of Job. Considering his triumphant battle against disease, that's kind of touching. Most often, though, the self-indulgence of the contributors is not so affecting.

That's what is hard to take about this book. It is not really about books. The professors come first. Its subtitle, "113 Eminent Harvard Professors Discuss the Books that Have Shaped Their Thinking" is really a more accurate description of the book than the full title.

The professors were asked not to submit a list of "great books," the kind students might read in a class on "The History of Thought Since the Dawn of Time." Too many, though, took this as a cue to list the works that set them off on their academic specialties. Given the eminence of the contributors, that's not necessarily boring stuff. But how many people are really going to go out and pick up a copy of the book that Sidney Verba writes "taught me how to think like a social scientist?"

Not many. That's why this book is so often more about influential Harvard professors than about influential books that mere mortals like you or I might someday actually read.

THE GUIDE IS most useful and enjoyable when the respondents describe books that meant much to them in a personal, non-professional, sense. Alan Brinkley, for instance, submitted a list of books which "have given me particular pleasure." Knowing why he likes Faulkner's Absalom! Absalom! or why particular books on Law Professor Martha Minow's shelf "are so worn from re-reading--or missing from the shelf altogether because I keep insisting that someone else read them" is interesting stuff. This book would be a lot better if there were more of it. But there isn't.

Perhaps all would be the wiser if they heeded the words of Nobel Laureate Sheldon Glashow, who refused to submit a list. "I care not for this cargo cult," he writes. "Books are cheap and readily available. To read is the thing, voraciously and eclectically. No guide is needed."