Great Books
The author, a longtime film critic, registered for the "Great Books" course at Columbia as a successful middle-aged journalist, to see what effect the culture wars had had on the academy, and to read a lot of famous classic works he had never encountered: Dante, Cervantes, Homer, Sappho, Hume, Montaigne, and so on. But he doesn't just summarize or even necessarily argue with mere texts; he tries to see what they might have to say to people today. The cha...
