title: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
author: Mortimer J. Adler
description: "These four hundred pages are packed full of high matters which no one solicitous of the future of American culture can afford to overlook." (Jacques Barzun)<br /><br />"It shows concretely how the serious work of proper reading may be accomplished and how much it may yield in the way of instruction and delight." (<i>The New Yorker</i>)<br /><br />"'There is the book; and here is your mind.' Adler and Van Doren's suggestions on how to connect the two will make you nostalgic for a slower, more earnest, less trivial time." (Anne Fadiman)
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  Over 40 years ago, Mortimer
  J. Adler,
  then
  a young educator, wrote
  his
  classic
  How to Read a Book.
  It became an instant
  bestseller, remaining on the
  lists for more
  than a year. Its worldwide sales today total
  some 7.5 million copies. Now Mr. Adler has
  written
  a companion book — How to
  Speak/How
  to
  Listen— ihai
  his audience
  will not only welcome but find of equal
  importance.
  "The two generally untaught skills,
  speaking and listening," he says, ''are much
  more difficult to acquire and more difficult
  to teach than the parallel skills of writing
  and reading." The major reason: The arts
  of grammar,
  rhetoric, and
  logic— formal
  courses in educational institutions through
  the eighteenth century that developed
  in-
  telligent speaking and listening—are no
  longer a part of our basic school curricu-
  lum.
  Mr. Adler rectifies this glaring gap with
  How to Speak/ How to Listen. Drawing on
  his decades
  of experience,
  he