BONFIRE OF THE HUMANITIES
Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age
By Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, and Bruce S. Thornton
List Item No. 298
ISBN: 1-882926-54-4 (cloth)
410 pages (includes Index)
List Price: $24.95
Internet Special: $21.21 —
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With humor, lucidity, and unflinching rigor, the acclaimed authors of Who Killed Homer? and Plagues of the Mind
unsparingly document the degeneration of a central, if beleaguered, discipline—classics—and reveal the root causes of its decline.
Hanson, Heath, and Thornton point to academics themselves—their careerist ambitions, incessant self-promotion, and overspecialized scholarship, among other things—as
the progenitors of the crisis, and call for a return to "academic populism," an approach characterized by accessible, unspecialized writing, selfless commitment to students and teaching, and respect for the legacy of freedom and democracy that the ancients bequeathed to the West.
What They're Saying...
"The profundity of the book lies in the fact that the authors shed light into the cave by utilizing the logic, close analysis, and bold confrontation common to the greatest of the ancient minds to expose many of the current problems. If the modern reader needs to see not only the effects of the academy's rejection of the classical ways but also the true genius of those ways, he need go no further than the pages of this volume."
—University Bookman
"[R]eaders who enjoy common sense expressed in vigorous prose are going to love The Bonfire of the Humanities."
— Academic Questions
"Bonfire of the Humanities is a necessary survey of such treason in one discipline of the humanities that illustrates the more general and persistent betrayal of a lost objectivity with which the academic world has long been plagued."
— Culture Wars
What they are also saying...
Chapters Include:
- Academic Populism and the Assault on the Classics
- Cultivating Sophistry
- Socrates Redux: Classics in the Multicultural University?
- More Quarreling in the Muses' Birdcage
- "Too Much Ego in Your Cosmos"
- The Enemy Is Us: The "Betrayal of the Postmodern Clerks"
- Self-Promotion and the "Crisis" in Classics
- Who Killed Homer?: The Prequel
- The Twilight of the Professors
- Not the Unabomber
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