"Undefeated by decades of rent increases and declining readership, Phil Cooper's secondhand bookstore finally succumbs to COVID-19 and he reluctantly decides to move the business online. In the newfound quiet of cybercommerce, he starts to suspect he's been smoking a little too much pot, listening to a little too much Grateful Dead, and may be overdue on sorting out who he is and what he's doing here, and where, in fact we might all be going. So he makes another decision: to teach himself 2,500 years of Western philosophy. Thankfully, he's met Caroline, an ex-postal worker and fellow book lover, who agrees to join him on his quest. But they'll have to hurry: Caroline has stage 4 cancer. Thankfully, they've got plenty of books, a stash of potent medical marijuana, and the Dead to see them through. It's going to be a long, strange trip. Profound, perceptive, and wryly observed, Estates Large and Small is the story of one man's reckoning and an ardent defense of the shape books make in a life."--

Issued also in electronic format