Bonfire of the Humanities

Bonfire of the Humanities PDF Author: Bruce S. Thornton
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497651603
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
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.

Bonfire of the Humanities

Bonfire of the Humanities PDF Author: Bruce S. Thornton
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497651603
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

The Bonfire of the Vanities PDF Author: Tom Wolfe
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429960566
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 708

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Book Description
Vintage Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the #1 bestseller that will forever define late-twentieth-century New York style. "No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton" (The National Review) “A page-turner . . . Brilliant high comedy.” (The New Republic) Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe's first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy, of New York in the 1980s, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now. Wolfe's novel is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis that reinforces the author's reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America. Adapted to film in 1990 by director Brian De Palma, the movie stars Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman.

Bonfire of the Humanities

Bonfire of the Humanities PDF Author: David Marc
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 9780815604631
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This volume focuses on the relationship between the rise of the multi-media environment-television and electronic media-and the decline of the humanities in academia, the changing role of print literacy, and the disintegration of historical consciousness. David Marc is as mad as hell about some things, and he's not going to take it any longer. He finds that most university humanities programs remain top-heavy with embittered careerists who would rather deny the evidence than admit that, with the rise and popular acceptance of mass media, their most cherished interests, their techniques, and skills have become archaic. New students are treated as if they read and write as often, and for the same purposes, as their counterparts before the rise of the television camera, telephone, and communications satellite. Professors get paid. Students receive diplomas. And yet, humanities courses are the joke of the campus. In analyzing the decline of the humanities on college campuses, Marc covers a wide range of issues, including political correctness, the growing tolerance of academic cheating, and institutionalized grade inflation.

The History Manifesto

The History Manifesto PDF Author: Jo Guldi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316165256
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
How should historians speak truth to power – and why does it matter? Why is five hundred years better than five months or five years as a planning horizon? And why is history – especially long-term history – so essential to understanding the multiple pasts which gave rise to our conflicted present? The History Manifesto is a call to arms to historians and everyone interested in the role of history in contemporary society. Leading historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage identify a recent shift back to longer-term narratives, following many decades of increasing specialisation, which they argue is vital for the future of historical scholarship and how it is communicated. This provocative and thoughtful book makes an important intervention in the debate about the role of history and the humanities in a digital age. It will provoke discussion among policymakers, activists and entrepreneurs as well as ordinary listeners, viewers, readers, students and teachers. This title is also available as Open Access.

Who Killed Homer?

Who Killed Homer? PDF Author: Victor Davis Hanson
Publisher: Encounter Books
ISBN: 1893554260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
With advice and informative readings of the great Greek texts, this title shows how we might save classics and the Greeks. It is suitable for those who agree that knowledge of classics acquaints us with the beauty and perils of our own culture.

Plagues of the Mind

Plagues of the Mind PDF Author: Bruce S. Thornton
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497648939
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
A stirring and sobering diagnosis of the challenges that confront anyone laboring to renew America’s tradition of ordered liberty. Classicist Bruce Thornton’s Plagues of the Mind is a forceful vindication of the West’s tradition of rational, critical inquiry—a legacy now largely jettisoned in favor of a host of new deities, environmentalism, feminism, primitivism, New Age, and the cult of the therapeutic among them.

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers PDF Author: Tom Wolfe
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 142996118X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers is classic Tom Wolfe, a funny, irreverent, and "delicious" (The Wall Street Journal) dissection of class and status by the master of New Journalism The phrase 'radical chic' was coined by Tom Wolfe in 1970 when Leonard Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers at his duplex apartment on Park Avenue. That incongruous scene is re-created here in high fidelity as is another meeting ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. Radical Chic provocatively explores the relationship between Black rage and White guilt. Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, set in San Francisco at the Office of Economic Opportunity, details the corruption and dysfunction of the anti-poverty programs run at that time. Wolfe uncovers how much of the program's money failed to reach its intended recipients. Instead, hustlers gamed the system, causing the OEO efforts to fail the impoverished communities.

A Man in Full

A Man in Full PDF Author: Tom Wolfe
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429960698
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 756

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Book Description
The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era--and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. With A Man in Full, the time the setting is Atlanta, Georgia--a racially mixed late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians. Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife--and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon--the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums--is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports--Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist. A Man in Full is a 1998 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

The Right Stuff

The Right Stuff PDF Author: Tom Wolfe
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429961325
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review), The Right Stuff is the basis for the 1983 Oscar Award-winning film of the same name and the 8-part Disney+ TV mini-series. From "America's nerviest journalist" (Newsweek)--a breath-taking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space. " Millions of words have poured forth about man's trip to the moon, but until now few people have had a sense of the most engrossing side of the adventure; namely, what went on in the minds of the astronauts themselves - in space, on the moon, and even during certain odysseys on earth. It is this, the inner life of the astronauts, that Tom Wolfe describes with his almost uncanny empathetic powers, that made The Right Stuff a classic.

Axel Honneth

Axel Honneth PDF Author: Christopher Zurn
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745686788
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
With his insightful and wide-ranging theory of recognition, AxelHonneth has decisively reshaped the Frankfurt School tradition ofcritical social theory. Combining insights from philosophy,sociology, psychology, history, political economy, and culturalcritique, Honneth’s work proposes nothing less than anaccount of the moral infrastructure of human sociality and itsrelation to the perils and promise of contemporary sociallife. This book provides an accessible overview of Honneth’s maincontributions across a variety of fields, assessing the strengthsand weaknesses of his thought. Christopher Zurn clearly explainsHonneth’s multi-faceted theory of recognition and itsrelation to diverse topics: individual identity, morality, activistmovements, progress, social pathologies, capitalism, justice,freedom, and critique. In so doing, he places Honneth’stheory in a broad intellectual context, encompassing classic socialtheorists such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Dewey, Adorno andHabermas, as well as contemporary trends in social theory andpolitical philosophy. Treating the full range of Honneth’scorpus, including his major new work on social freedom anddemocratic ethical life, this book is the most up-to-date guideavailable. Axel Honneth will be invaluable to students and scholarsworking across the humanities and social sciences, as well asanyone seeking a clear guide to the work of one of the mostinfluential theorists writing today.