Foundation: How to Read a Book, Mortimer J. Adler

Foundation:

How to Read a Book, Van Doren, Charles, Mortimer J. Adler.

How to Read A Book: 26 pages; 12,498 words


Preface

How to Read a Book was first published in the early months of 1940. To my surprise and, I confess, to my delight, it immediately became a best seller and remained at the top of the nationwide best-seller list for more than a year. Since 1940, it has continued to be widely circulated in numerous printings, both hardcover and paperback, and it has been translated into other languages—French, Swedish, German, Spanish, and Italian. Why, then, attempt to recast and rewrite the book for the present generation of

readers

ers?

Mortimer Adler
However, certain things have not changed in the last thirty years. One constant is that, to achieve all the purposes of reading, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different—appropriate—speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed. As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, “When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.” Since speed-reading has become a national fad, this new edition of How to Read a Book deals with the problem and proposes variable-speed-reading as the solution, the aim being to read better, always better,


Charles Van Doren



How to Read A Book: 26 pages; 12,498 words