By Merle Rubin: Special to the Times
FOR THE LOVE OF IT Amateuring and Its Rivals; by Wayne Booth;
University of Chicago Press; $22, 238 pages
These reviews from England and Los Angeles look at a new book from
LDS author Wayne C. Booth, a Professor Emeritus of English at the
University of Chicago. Booth also wrote The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961)
and A Rhetoric of Irony (1974).
Both reviews compliment the book and its look at "amateuring." Instead
of "amateur" status being taken as a notch below "professional", Booth
writes of "amateur" as being an almost purer devotion to a subject.
Booth uses his own long-time love for playing the cello as an example.
He writes, "I . . . hope you'll agree with my claim . . . that the joys of
amateuring deserve celebration . . . It may be in a sense an `insanity',
but like very few other human pursuits, it carries us out of this world,
into what I can only call the timeless.'
Booth credits his LDS upbringing for the basis of feeling that constant
"bettering" of oneself is a virtue.
