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.