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Title: Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath ISBN: 1-893554-26-0 Publisher: Encounter Books Pub. Date: March, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.27 (33 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Important Wake-up call!
Comment: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Itawoke in me a new desire to reclaim a classical education (which I am now doing by learning Ancient Greek!).
It is important in today's era of "multiculturalism" to recognize that not all cultures are created equal. The Greco-Roman tradition gave us the foundation for our own form of a Democratic Republic. While it is the PC fashion now to criticize the Greeks for their treatment of women and slaves let us not forget that many countries/cultures still engage in slavery (West Africa), or brutal treatment of women (Islamic). As so elegantly pointed out, the *only* culture which took major steps to eradicate these inequities were the Western ones and most specifically the United States.
Even in Ancient Greece, many voices (Aristophanes, Euripides) can be read as speaking out against social injustice. If we let the classics die in our colleges and universities upon the sacrificial altar of feminism, multiculturalism, or political correctness, we will have lost part of the American soul and more importantly - our intellectual heritage! This book is a clarion call to what is so wrong in academia today and to the fact that we had best wake up before it is too late!
By the way - I am a liberal, but not a radical leftist!
Rating: 4
Summary: provocative
Comment: A reviewer below, who describes himself as a cognitive psychologist with an interest in classics, said that this book convinced him not to waste four years studying Greek just to understand the nuances lost in translation; programming languages and other applied fields are worthier of the student's time. I must applaud a cognitive psychologist for taking an interest in classics, but his view exemplifies the problem with our university education that the authors of WHO KILLED HOMER aim to attack in the first place. Being in the field of cognitive science myself, I am quite familiar with the simple-mindedness, not to say ignorance and arrogance, so common among its practitioners. The view expressed by our cognitive psychologist seems quite typical. Whether or not one should devote time to the study of Greek is a matter of choice; surely the student can decide for herself. But to say that it is not inherently worthwhile as programming languages is mistaken, and to say that people only study Greek due to cognitive dissonance is exceptionally stupid. (The very concept of cognitive dissonance is neither original nor helpful, perhaps useful for social psychologists for their problematic predictions but will disappear altogether from textbooks in about 50 yrs as a historical relic of the bad old days of psychology in its primitive phase.) How can our scientifically minded psychologist be so certain about the value of something he himself never studied? Perhaps the nuances lost in translation are the truly important ones; perhaps those with such faith in translation should not claim that they have understood the classics; perhaps Greek is not as difficult as the numbers (350 verb forms) would suggest. The truth is: the professional practioners and naive friends of classics cause more harm to the discipline than its true enemies. WHO KILLED HOMER? would be worth reading if only for this reason.
Rating: 5
Summary: Elegy for Hellas
Comment: Having majored in 'penniless student of Greek' in college I was surprised to read here that I was in what could be the last generation of this tradition. Although much of the diagnosis is open to debate, perhaps faulty on several points, the controversy has perhaps obscured the basically accurate point the authors seem to be making, that of the passage of a great tradition of learning. The author's indictment of the method of teaching certainly rings true. I arrived with a lot of advanced placement and my knowledge of classics peaked the first week of my freshman year as I ended in a permanent huff over pedantic Wilamowitz style philology and disappointed that that was all there was going to be. So university was at least an opportunity to educate myself in the Western tradition by ignoring the professors. Majoring in classics was a big risk, what a waste.
This is such a provocative and interesting book that one need not agree at all points to find it important reading. And it is strange and sad a high tech civilization seems both unaware and indifferent to the disappearance of this form of education. Part of the problem is that for all its science modern society has no coherent view of history and the authors attempt to rescue the study of Greece from faddish theory is convincing. Their 'utopian' proposal to remedy the university graduate scene is radical indeed, small wonder irate colleagues counterattacked.
This book raises questions beyond its basic thesis. We need a new type of university educational system, that's for sure.
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Title: Ripples of Battle : How Wars of the Past Still Determine How We Fight, How We Live, and How We Think by VICTOR HANSON ISBN: 0385504004 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 16 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: Carnage and Culture : Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power by Victor Hanson ISBN: 0385720386 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 27 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: An Autumn of War : What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism by Victor Hanson ISBN: 1400031133 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 13 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece by Victor Davis Hanson, John Keegan ISBN: 0520219112 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 11 February, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton ISBN: 1882926544 Publisher: ISI Books Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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