With a heavy focus on the role of character in American politics and literature, Garber’s book sheds a necessary light on the often unrecognized influence of character in society. Although this work is not one to turn to for light-hearted pleasure or an easy read, it is a valuable addition to anyone’s reading list.

This panoramic look at the concept of character reveals cultural shifts, unexploded fallacies, and more than a little bad behavior, rhetorical and otherwise.

Can an examination of the single word 'character' sustain a book of 383 pages and another 40-odd pages of endnotes? Turns out it can, and does so brilliantly in Marjorie Garber’s magisterial book on the word, its etymology, its altered meanings, its social ramifications. Best known for her work on Shakespeare, Ms. Garber from time to time departs her field to take on other, dare one say unlikely, subjects, among them sex and real estate, bisexuality, the love of dogs, and cross-dressing. Scholarly by training and savvy by instinct, she writes without any of the dampening jargon now common in academic prose and with an impressive respect for the complexity of her subject.

Character names at once an ideal or aspiration and an ineradicable mark; a state to be arrived at by will; and a condition requiring education, leadership, and propitious circumstance. 'Is character innate, learned, taught, or instilled? Are character traits fixed or changeable? Do they depend on heredity, on environment, on parents, teachers, mentors, or life experiences?' Garber asks versions of these questions throughout, but she considers them chiefly literary—that is, 'questions about the way something means, rather than what it means,'.

The through line in [Garber's] eclectic body of work has been an interest in the proper use of literature, which exists, Garber argues, not as a tool of moral instruction but as 'a way of thinking.' To think in a literary way is to privilege the question over the answer, to embrace uncertainty and associative imagination. 'I do not propose to diagnose culture as if it were an illness of which we could be cured,' she has maintained, 'but to read culture as if it were structured like a dream'.

Garber, a Harvard professor of English and visual and environmental studies, brings a wide range of sources to her erudite, illuminating study.