Simply delightful. Stanley Fish appreciates “sentences that take your breath away.” His enthusiasm is infectious, fuelled by examples drawn from great literature. He makes you want to read each of those works (and countless others) slowly, so that you can savour every last sentence.
This is not a manual of style or correct usage; comparisons with Strunk and White are misplaced. There are a few simple exercises suggested, but what Fish is aiming at is not pedagogy, and certainly not pedantry. It is, rather, I think, a genuine wish to encourage readers (and writers) to refocus on the very stuff that makes great literature great: sentences.
What are sentences? They are basic building blocks of meaning, an organization of items in the world, a structure of logical relationships. It sounds a bit like the early Wittgenstein re-heated by J.L. Austin. It’s not. Stanley Fish is an unapologetic child of the New Criticism. His formula – Sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation – is nothing less than a justification for steeping oneself in the finest sentences that the history of literature can provide. Which is precisely what he does.