What I Read Last Year And I Wish I Were Reading Now

This was a good book. No, this was a magnificent book. It reminded me of stuff I learned in 7th, 9th and 11th grades about the history of the English language. Except this time it was INTERESTING! Sure, I'm older and wiser and all that, and I have less hair, which I'm sure helps, but this author is also a much better writer than the folks who wrote those textbooks I had to suffer through as a ward of the government schools.

It's impossible to begin to summarize this book. All I can say is that it gives you a great appreciation for the fascinating history and amazing complexity of our language. It's also really cool to read the Lord's Prayer in Old and Middle English.

A great Father's Day gift!

What I'm Reading This Week

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

--C.S. Lewis.
I'm more like one old one to thirty new ones. But I'm hoping it helps to read a really old one -- just over 800 years, as it happens. Now, I know that 800 years isn't really all that old when you think about books, many of which were written more than two or even three thousand years ago, but as a twenty-first century American, I think the early 1200s is enough of a gap to give me the benefits of reading the writing of a man who lived in a very, very different culture from my own.

And did he ever. Just imagine a book by a general in the Iraq War beginning with a modern equivalent of these words:

In the year of our Lord 1198, when Innocent was Pope in Rome, Philip was King of France and Richard King of England, there lived in France a man of saintly character called Foulques, who was in holy orders and priest of the parish of Neuilly, a small town lying between Paris and Lagny-sur-Marne. This same Foulques began to preach the Word of God throughout the Ile de France and in other surrounding provinces; and God worked many miracles for his sake.

It's the "man of saintly character" living in France that really shows you how different the world was in 1198!

Villehardouin's work is a first-person narrative of the disastrous Fourth Crusade that (if memory serves since I'm not through with the book yet) resulted in the sack of Constantinople, the greatest and wealthiest Christian city on the planet at the time -- by the Crusaders! Although this is history, the "plot" of this shaggy-dog story is better than most works of fiction I've ready, and it would make a terrific movie -- much better than the Crusade-tale "The Kingdom of Heaven" from a couple of years ago. Hollywood wouldn't even have to invent characters -- the screen would be lit up by the blind Doge of Venice leading his men ashore in Byzantium, Thibaut, appetite-inspiring knights like the Comte de Champagne et de Brie, Emperor Isaac of Constantinople, who was dethroned, blinded and imprisoned by his brother, but reinstated by the Crusader army, and Villehardouin himself, the Marshal of Champagne (and later Romania!).

Most striking is how readable Villehardouin is, despite the distance of eight centuries. In part because he was dictating, the book reads like a transcript of a television documentary interview with an old soldier.

And best of all, it's a Penguin Classic. There's just something about those black and yellow covers, the scholarly introduction and the pricing on the cover for the USA, the UK, New Zealand, and Canada. And often a tasteful note on the font (though all we get in this version is a description that the font is set in "Monotype Bembo" -- it's a little disappointing not to get the history of the font).

So read this book today! This book will change your life! Maybe Oprah will pick this book next!

When Book-Worlds Collide

Rarely does this happen. In fact, I've tried to remember when it's happened before, and I can't. I've probably experienced it before -- in reverse, anyway -- when reading one book because I saw it referenced in another. But THIS time there was a link between two books you'd NEVER expect to be linked -- THE LAST TWO BOOKS I REVIEWED!!!

Yes, it's true. There's a link between Nancy French's "A Red State of Mind" (thanks for the comment, Nancy!) and David Horowitz's "Indoctrination U"!!! On page 79 of Horowitz's book (which I finished tonight to the accompaniment of XM Radio's Classic Country station), Horowitz is discussing hearings on academic freedom -- or the lack of it -- in Pennsylvania state universities and colleges that took place in the Pennsylvania legislature, and Horowitz includes these sentences:

At the very first session in Harrisonburg, attorney David French testified that speech codes at fifteen of the seventeen universities in the Penn State system were violating their students' First Amendment rights. French was in a position to know since he had already successfully sued one of the Penn State campuses over the constitutionality of its codes. Yet after hearing this testimony, Representative Dan Surra, a Democrat member of the committee, attacked the proceedings as "a colassal waste of time," Afterwards, he told a reporter that it was "a hunt for Bigfoot." There could be no clearer indication that the opposition was uninterested in the facts or in the academic freedom of Pennsylvania students.

And just who is David French? Well, after reading both Horowitz's book and Nancy French's book, I conclude that he is none other than the law professor husband of Nancy French, the would-be Catfish Queen! (You've really got to read her book to understand.)

Coincidence? I think NOT!!!

What I'm Reading Now

So what's your impression of the state of "academic freedom" on the typical college campus? Hey, with all the crazy stuff going on at the typical university, people must be free to say pretty much whatever they want, right? And aren't all those lefty professor types super-committed to freedom of speech? Well, no, says Mr. Horowitz.

To understand what this book is about, you have to appeciate the life of David Horowitz, which you can't do unless you read his autobiography, Radical Son. A true "red diaper baby", Horowitz even attended Camp Wo-Chi-Cha as a child in the 1940s. Lest you think that's a cute mid-century tribute to the Iroqois, I need to point out that "Wo-Chi-Cha" was short for "Workers' Childrens Camp". Horowitz progressed to 60s campus radical and leftist revolutionary, but somehow drifted right as he realized that all the talk about freedom, rights, dignity and respect on the far left was just that -- talk. He soon began to attack the left using the left's own methods (which were, until pretty recently, much more advanced and effective than the right's methods) against it.

This book is about Horowitz's campaign over the last decade to restore a conservative voice on the typical US college campus in the name of "academic freedom", a quaint concept from a hundred years ago about how professors shouldn't abuse their power in the classroom by indoctrinating their charges in their own political preferences. If you doubt how out of fashion this idea is, you really need to read this book. The treatment Horowitz has received from the left for pointing out the monolithic nature of the political philosophy promulgated on the typical college campus is appalling. Yet entirely predictable to anyone enrolled as a student in a medium to large US college with decent academic pretensions in the last twenty years.

After you read this, you should read William F. Buckley, Jr.'s God and Man at Yale and George Marsden's The Soul of the American University if you want to know how things got to this sorry state. Then go start a classical school in your spare time.

What I Just Read

I know, I know. The cover doesn't promise much. But if you're from the South and you've ever wondered what it would be like to move to the big city up North, or if you just wonder what it would be like to be a single red dot in a giant blue state, this book is for you. Plus, there's a great joke about why Southern women get pregnant so much more often than Northern women.

The author and her husband live in Columbia, Tennessee, but they've endured tours of duty at David Lipscomb University in Nashville, in Manhattan, in Philadelphia, and several other places in between. We hear from friends in Columbia that they're good folks. Of course we don't like them because she wrote a book and had it published, and we just blog.