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The Moral Compass: Stories for a Life's Journey edited with commentary by William J. Bennett
(Simon & Schuster, 824 pp., $30)
In the great debate about whether it is possible to teach morality, William Bennett is clearly on the affirmative side: just buy this book, read it to your children (but pay attention yourself]), and urge your friends, neighbors, workmates and business associates to do the same. If you could somehow get the book into the hands of the local drug dealer, second-story man, mugger, corrupt cop, white collar embezzler and slumlord-to read to their children--all our problems would be solved. The only difficulty will be in persuading the kids to sit still for Bennett's collection of edifying tales and homilies.
This is Bennett's second collection; I managed to avoid the first, The Book of Virtues, a runaway best-seller (so we should be in better shape already), but Bennett describes this one as more of the same, so I haven't looked back. The material, he says, is vast: moralizing folk-tales, nursery rhymes, fables, ditties, bits and pieces from the Bible and the Greek classics and a smaller number of carefully vetted short stories. Once upon a time, people thought that edifying tales were meant to be read again and again, but it turns out that more is better--800 pages more, in this case. If you imagined that you were already edified, you have work to do.
Bennett's point of reference is the family of ancient days, before radio and television, whose members read books aloud to one another, sitting together in the living room or beside a child's bed: the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, Little Women and so on. But he doesn't really aim to reproduce that attractive scene, for he has no confidence in books like those three. Compared to his own book they are indeed complex, morally ambiguous and dangerous--which may help to explain why people of all ages sat still for them and read them over and over again (though all my examples, I admit, had sequels).
The tales and homilies in The Moral Compass are short. They are mostly "adaptations" or "retellings of adaptations," and they are preceded, every one, by Bennett's "commentaries," editorial notes that tell the reader exactly what the...