The Intellectual Vocation

Joshua P. Hochschild reviews How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, by Scott Newstok, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, by Zena Hitz, and Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, by Alan Jacobs, at First Things.

"Anything like traditional rhetorical education is by now rare and usually accidental, and while some of us still try to keep alive a classical conception of 'liberal education,' we sense a need for new rhetorical resources to capture what that is. Three new books about thinking testify that the old learning is ever-renewing, and available to anyone who knows what to look for."