RUTHFULLY YOURS

amgreatness.com/2020/01/04/there-are-great-books/

Those classics that are called the Great Books are most closely associated with Mortimer J. Adler and Robert Hutchins.1 When Hutchins became president of the University of Chicago in 1929, he hired Adler to teach philosophy in the law school and the psychology department. Upon arriving, Adler, rather brashly he admits, recommended to Hutchins a program of study for undergraduates using classic texts. Adler had taught in the General Honors program at Columbia University begun in 1921 by professor John Erskine. Hutchins asked him for a list of books to be read in such a program. When Hutchins saw the list, he told Adler that he had not encountered most of them during his student years at Oberlin College and Yale University. Hutchins later wrote that unless Adler “did something drastic he [Hutchins, referring to himself] would close his educational career a wholly uneducated man.”2 Hutchins remained president for 16 years before serving as chancellor until 1951, and the following year, they did something drastic.

In 1952, Adler and Hutchins published the Great Books of the Western World in 54 volumes.3 Adler and Hutchins included the 714 authors they considered most important to the development of Western Civilization.4 The influence of their Great Books movement on American culture for several decades was considerable and continues to this day.

Their selection of books from over a half-century ago has held up rather well. For example, I compared them to the 2007 list published by journalist and cultural critic J. Peder Zane. Zane asked 125 leading writers to list their favorite works of fiction.5 Zane found that the 20 most common titles listed by the writers were:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/gertrude-himmelfarb-11577837798?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

She was an accomplished historian known for rigorous scholarship, brilliant essays, and her forceful defense of morality in democratic politics. We’re referring to Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died Monday at age 97.

A native of Brooklyn who earned degrees from the University of Chicago, Himmelfarb achieved intellectual fame as a writer with her third book, “Victorian Minds” (1968). The collection of essays on major figures in the British 19th century challenged the prevailing view of the Victorians as incurious moral prudes.

In that book and several subsequent collections, particularly “Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians” (1986), Himmelfarb contended that the old virtues—temperance, chastity, industry—didn’t repress individual creativity. Instead they enabled a century of cultural flourishing and political stability.

She also wrote with insight on the follies of the French Revolution and the assorted non-philosophies known as postmodernism, and she was unafraid to criticize eminent peers when she thought their writings wrongheaded or precious. She memorably found fault with Roy Jenkins’s biography of Winston Churchill for failing to acknowledge what every ordinary person knew: Churchill was a great man.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-winter-army-review-the-mountain-men-11577463400?mod=opinion_major_pos11

Lots of tales are told around roaring fires in ski lodges, stories about the day’s conquest of high bumps and deep fears on the trails, about the defiance of ferocious storms and the wolf winds of winter, about adventures in the back bowls and amid the pines and birches—and, at times, tales of poles broken on the chairlift and comical acts of ineptitude on the bunny slopes.

But every now and then, someone will offer up tales of a different genre altogether—stories that do not fade when the après-ski drinks wear off. These are the ones about the men who went to war on skis and later helped to build the resorts that are by now legendary among amateurs and professionals alike: Colorado’s Arapahoe Basin, Washington State’s Crystal Mountain, New Mexico’s Sandia Peak, Vermont’s Sugarbush, Oregon’s Mount Bachelor, Utah’s Alta.

The Winter Army

By Maurice Isserman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 318 pages, $28

Meet the men of the 10th Mountain Division. Their peacetime achievements are themselves remarkable: Five of them were on the United States ski team in the 1948 Olympics, and a sixth was their coach. All told, five dozen ski areas across North America bear their mark, from selecting the terrain to designing the trails to installing the ski tows, lifts and funiculars. Their postwar achievements—basically building an industry out of an avocation—were set in motion by their unusual training as the nation’s World War II ski troops. It was in such an undertaking that they harnessed their reverence and respect for the mountains and then set out to share their sense of wonder—and their remarkable skills on skis.

Their training and wartime exploits are at the center of “The Winter Army,” a captivating account of the 10th Mountain Division by the Hamilton College historian Maurice Isserman. It is good to have the stories of these men between hard covers, for their heroics occurred three-quarters of a century ago and are in danger of disappearing.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/31/rand-pauls-case-against-socialism/

The Case against Socialism, by Rand Paul (Broadside Books, 368 pp., $28.99)

Just three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, socialist political activism has undergone a remarkable rehabilitation. Survey data show the label’s growing popularity among college students, while Karl Marx holds the title of the most frequently assigned author from the philosophical canon in American university classrooms. Far from bearing the stigma one might reasonably expect to accompany a movement that killed 100 million people in the 20th century, socialist ideology retains a position of high esteem in elite academic, journalistic, and intellectual circles.

One recurring source of the problem is the intentional cultivation of a definitional fluidity that operates at the convenience of socialism’s adherents. Modern politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez euphemize the term by prefixing it with the label “democratic” (it strains credulity to imagine that fascism, for example, would ever be afforded similar leeway in rebranding itself). Meanwhile, failing socialist experiments such as the Maduro regime in Venezuela — extolled among leftist intellectuals as a modern socialist success story only a few years ago — are brushed aside with the familiar refrain that they never achieved “real socialism.” The practical result of these ubiquitous word games is a political climate in which socialists never quite reckon with their own track record.