Erik Graff's Reviews > The Wealth of Nations

A prideful and ambitious boy, hearing that President Kennedy had been a speed reader, I cut lawns and shovelled walks to pay for an Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics program. We met in the spare basement of the hideous modern structure that passed for Park Ridge's "Inn"--a residence primarily for attendants and pilots from the airlines utilizing nearby O'Hare International Airport. I was a sophomore, the youngest in class, quite serious and full of myself.

The Wood method consisted, basically, of two parts. First, don't subvocalize while reading. Second, run a finger down the page while soft-focusing on the text. The rest was a matter of practice and ever-faster fingers until some of us were "reading" as fast as we could turn the pages.

The texts for class were, one suspects, Ms. Wood's efforts to make the world a better place. They included Ayn Rand's Anthem, an early exercise, and Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, the final exercise. I was so expert by that time that the Wealth of Nations took no longer than Rand's novella had--thirty or forty minutes maybe.

The whole business was a sham of course. What we were learning was how to skim and cram, skim and cram for examinations designed to pick up on the kinds of material one might retain from a skim and cram method. The rest depended upon what Marx termed "the labor theory of value"--we had spent a lot of money and time on this stuff, so it had better have paid off or we'd be fools.

It took me about a year of skimming and cramming to give up and decide I had, in fact, been a fool. Thus I returned to the old, much more pleasant ways of reading and, in time, even reread Marx's great hero, Adam Smith...while on the beach in Michigan and over several days.