A Little Bit of Luck

In slightly less than three hundred pages Altick a self-described child of the Depression takes us from his birth in 1915 through his early interest in reading turn-of-the-century bestsellers rarely the Bible or the usual classics to his secondary school college and postgraduate education pausing frequently to provide fascinating portraits of now-vanished scholars and educational practice. It is all both so similar and so different. Always modest and always happy exploring libraries Altick a man known for his apparently encyclopedic knowledge of subjects he''s studied--research techniques the nineteenth-century reader Victorian popular entertainment and so on--described himself as having a primarily journalistic bent. Modestly plugging away at research apparently far too daunting for the rest of us he produced valuable work that has stood the test of time.