Brooks on Books: The Purpose of the Past by Gordon Wood

I don't know if distinguished historian, author, and professor Gordon Wood is a fan of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, but each time I pick up this book, I can't help but sing:

The purpose of the past
is to love a woman
And the purpose of a woman
is to love the past
So come on, baby, let's start today
Come on, baby, let's play
The game of love (love)
love (love)
la la la la la love...

And then I get this picture of Wood at some dive bar just off campus, breaking away from his tweed-jacketed colleagues and approaching a comely grad student in the corner, telling her, "Hey, baby, you love the past?"

You judge whether that's disrespectful to this respected scholar or just a really cool scenario.

As for the book: "The Purpose of the Past" is a collection of previously published Gordon Wood book reviews from a variety of publications such as "The New York Review of Books," nearly all dealing with the early days of America. The selection isn't random; each review represents a different approach to history, such as "fiction," "multiculturalism," postmodernism," and many more. Each review covers the book's topic and the writing, but it also gives Wood an opportunity to discuss the relative merits of the approach to history used by the author. New afterwords written for this volume clarify Wood's thinking.

There is some interesting material here for casual history fans as well as some possible reading list additions, but it's not a breezy read. Wood often criticizes inaccessible, overly dense writing, and he is certainly not guilty of providing that, but this is as much a book about how to practice and study history as it is history itself. You might have to be pretty committed to want to read reviews that use words like "epistemology" so often, and many casual readers might be turned off by such an inside baseball approach.

Wood raves about some authors and layeth the smack down on others. One thing that really bugs him is the imposition of modern attitudes and beliefs on the individuals and events of the past; his eloquent attacks on such anachronistic approaches recur throughout the reviews.

I sort of picked this up at random, and while I don't know if I found too many things to add to my own "must read" list, I enjoyed Wood's writing, and the reviews here are educational both about American history itself and how it is written and has been over the years. It's provocative and compelling even for a non-historian such as myself, someone who just likes to read some history every now and then. So I enjoyed "The Purpose of the Past" and polished it off pretty quickly. I have to admit, though, that's enough of this kind of thing for now. Next I'd rather just read one of Wood's fine history books. However, I'd certainly be glad to read his reviews of other works as they appear.