The Great Books

Great Books 

by David Denby

“Whether white, black, Asian, or Latino, American students rarely arrive at college as habitual readers, which means that few of them have more than a nominal connection to the past. It is absurd to speak, as does the academic left, of classic Western texts dominating and silencing everyone but a ruling elite or white males. The vast majority of white students do not know the intellectual tradition that is allegedly theirs any better than black or brown ones do. They have not read its books, and when they do read them, they may respond well, but they will not respond in the way that the academic left supposes. For there is only one ‘hegemonic discourse’ in the lives of American undergraduates, and that is the mass media. Most high schools can't begin to compete against a torrent of imagery and sound that makes every moment but the present seem quaint, bloodless, or dead.”  ― David Denby, Great Books


I have been reading and discussing the Great Books for more than thirty years with fellow readers in various groups and classes. I recently returned to a book I read more than twenty years ago by David Denby, a prominent film critic.  He had returned to the Ivy League classroom to consider the Great Books as a front-line correspondent on the culture wars. 

Denby spent an academic year attending Columbia University's famous "core curriculum'' classes in the great books, "Literature, Humanities, and Contemporary Civilization". He recreates his experience of reading, pondering, and discussing classic texts from the ancient Greeks (Homer, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Euripides, and Sappho) to Nietzsche, Freud, and Conrad, all the time maintaining and meditating on his intensely cosmopolitan yet family-centered life. When Denby reads Plato and Aristotle, or for that matter Austen, he contemplates how the "media fog" to which he contributes as a film critic envelops his fellow students; when he reads Woolf, or for that matter Virgil, he considers the transformations wrought in his own lifetime by feminism. He makes a sensible, if gloomy, argument that the Great Books are too hard for today's underprepared and thus overwhelmed undergraduates. Needless to say, based on my own experience, I reject his epiphanies over a feminist critique of Aristotle's Politics. By recording his own intellectual experiences while glossing over his own cultural blindness he does a disservice to those texts he critiques. 

Rather than distilling some of the significant ideas of the great thinkers that he read he merely tosses off a rejection of "ideologues" in general with lines like this:"By the end of my year in school, I knew that the culture-ideologues, both left and right, are largely talking nonsense."(p 459) This conclusion may have a grain of truth, but I would rather hear what he learned about knowing and thinking, what lessons still have meaning in the twentieth  and twenty-first century, and what truths he discovered that our culture still adheres to with justification.


While he does put himself on the line as a student and as a person by actually reading the classics, his humility should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt. At the risk of being too skeptical, based on my own reading of these texts, I found this an unconvincing look at the classics. I would recommend you read the original classics - the Great Books - with an open mind and then, if you choose to, consider Denby's book.

A Robot in Your Future?

The Coming of the Robots 

editied by Sam Moskowitz

"Helen's technique may have lacked polish, but it had enthusiasm, as he found when he tried to stop her from kissing him. She learned fast and furiously---also, Helen was powered by an atomotor." - Lester Del Rey, "Helen O'Loy"









Sam Moskowitz has gathered an anthology of robot stories with the classics "I, Robot" by Eando Binder  and "Misfit" by Michael Fischer, among others. My favorite was "Helen O'Loy" by Lester Del Rey -- a story of a female robot who falls in love with her owner.

All of the stories provide entertainment that you wish would not end. Overall a great introduction to some of the great science fiction authors of the early days that will leave you searching for their other books.

Seeing Yourself Backward

A Scanner Darkly 

by Philip K. Dick

“I have seen myself backward.”
― Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly




This book tested my ability to follow the story of a protagonist with a deteriorating personality and relate to the culture of drug usage and addiction that led to that. I was unsuccessful relating to that culture in spite of the author's marvelous imagination and his ability to make the descent of the protagonist believable.

The protagonist is an undercover narcotics agent who poses as drug user Bob Arctor. Bob shares his house with two other users, Barris and Luckman, and has a girlfriend, Donna, who is a small-time dealer. Bob is addicted to Substance D—the “D” standing primarily for Death—and is ostensibly using Donna to find the source of this drug. Bob, using the alias Fred, is assigned to monitor the group at Bob’s house, but by necessity, that means he must monitor himself as Bob or blow his cover. The use of "scramble suits" that modify what others see when someone wears them, and allow Bob to masquerade as Fred, is the primary science fiction element in the novel.

When surveillance of Bob’s house intensifies because of suspicious behavior, so do acts of sabotage occurring against Bob. When the government installs monitoring equipment in his house, Bob and his housemates almost die from somebody tinkering with his car. As Fred, he finds himself reviewing the recordings of Bob and his friends, and in so doing finding himself in difficult discussions with his supervisor and fellow agents about the results. Fred also becomes disassociated from Bob, reaching a point where his/their mind is unable to guess each other’s actions. The title of the novel refers to the surveillance tool and the consequences when Bob/Fred cannot comprehend what he sees. It is also an allusion to the biblical phrase "through a glass darkly" (1st Corinthians 13:12).

The author is at his best in depicting how Substance D has damaged Bob's brain, splitting his personae and resulting in a decline into a state near brain death. Just as this process starts, Barris comes to the police and offers information that will get Bob busted as a major drug dealer-conspirator. Fred’s cover is blown, and he is placed in a detoxification program of "New-Path", where he takes on the name Bruce, his mental functions severely deteriorated.

The novel is loosely plotted, often going on tangents that help reinforce a sense of the drug community’s frame of mind (such as it is!). Along that line, the paranoia that Bob/Fred suffers is never confirmed. Was Barris the one sabotaging Bob’s belongings? Dick refers time and again to the capricious behavior of people on drugs and how one betraying whim does not necessarily link to others. Further, why is New-Path growing Substance D—outright greed and opportunism, or perhaps a means of gaining control of people who otherwise would resist being told what to do?

This is both a story about a community of drug users and one about the split personality of one man. The first chapter focuses on a friend of Bob who must cope with hallucinatory aphids, mirroring Bob’s own descent at the end. In an author’s note, Dick dedicated the book to friends from his own drug-using community, not condemning their choice but fully cognizant of the consequences they suffered. This is a book I would recommend only if you have already read some of Philip K. Dick's better novels like Ubik and The Man in the High Castle (my favorite).

A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, Gollancz, 2006(1977)

History, Family, and Chance

Pachinko 

by Min Jin Lee

"History has failed us, but no matter."
- Pachinko, Min Jin Lee, (p.1)





Min Jin Lee's second novel is historical, centered on the saga of a Korean family which immigrates to Japan. While history, both of the family and the times in which they lived, is pervasive throughout the novel, this is also an intimate story of family relations and most importantly the element of chance in the lives of the characters. The importance of chance is epitomized by the titular game of chance, Pachinko, that plays an important role in the story.

Pachinko also is a novel that describes the struggle between two ethnicities, Japanese and South Korean, that are forced to co-exist because one country conquers the other. It starts off in Yeongdo, a South Korean fishing village. Here, the author introduces a poor fisherman, his wife, and their clever, disabled son, Hoonie. At some point, during Hoonie's adult life, Japan colonizes South Korea and life becomes more difficult for the natives. Despite the rise in the cost of living, the family of Hoonie and his parents still manages to make ends meet with their lodging business. Hoonie later marries Yangjin and they have a beautiful daughter without any deformities whom they name Sunja. When Hoonie later dies Yangjin is forced to take care of her daughter all by herself, managing to do so by continuing their successful lodging business.

The story follows Sunja, a Korean girl, through the vicissitudes of her life when she leaves Korea for Japan. Her family struggles to fit into Japanese society, because of the historical animosity between the two cultures. Koreans in Japan were viewed as second-class citizens, and they suffered discrimination. Sunja also personally struggles with her identity, because of the circumstances in which she left Korea at sixteen years of age. One way she preserves her Korean identity is by making and selling kimchee, the pickled cabbage condiment strongly associated with Korea. Kimchee lasts for a long time, providing a good metaphor for the struggle of someone trying to survive and keep their identity in a foreign land.

Throughout the story their lives are affected by random events. Sunja gets pregnant. The Second World War breaks out. Sunja’s sons become Pachinko parlor owners. All of these are chance occurrences without which the story would have been much different. The title of the book, Pachinko, is an indicator of just how important chance is to the story. The game of Pachinko involves watching a steel ball bounce around a pin-ball-like board as it falls through bumpers, holes, and traps before landing in point-scoring or prize-winning slots at the bottom. In the same way, Sunja’s life was influenced by forces outside her control. She made decisions in reaction to her circumstances, but the main events of her life seem like obstacles which she avoids or collides with at random.

The author uses a simple prose style, yet her prose is deceptive in that there are serious ideas that she explores through the history of the descendants of Hoonie. I found myself comparing the discrimination faced by Sunja and her sons with that experienced by many immigrants in America's history. All the while the force of historical events provided a profound backdrop for the family's story. Lee's novel was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction in 2017. It is a rewarding book to read and worthy of accolades it has received.

Courage and Perseverance

Death Comes for the Archbishop 

by Willa Cather

“Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!”  ― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop






Willa Cather believed this novel to be her finest work. Like The Professor’s House, it is a novel that explores the life of a man and draws on the American Southwest for its setting. Here the similarity ends, however, as the tone of the two books is quite different.


The novel celebrates the life choices of its central characters, finding in the lives of Father Joseph Vaillant and Father Jean Marie Latour a simple dignity and extraordinary fulfillment. The narrative has frequent digressions, either in terms of stories related to the pair (including the story of the Our Lady of Guadeloupe and the murder of an oppressive Spanish priest at Acoma Pueblo) or through their recollections. There is an omniscient narrator, while interwoven in the narrative are fictionalized accounts of actual historical figures, including Kit Carson, Manuel Antonio Chaves and Pope Gregory XVI.

In the prologue, Bishop Montferrand, a French bishop who works in the New World, is soliciting three cardinals at Rome to pick his candidate for the newly created diocese of New Mexico (which has recently passed into American hands). Ultimately he is successful in getting his preferred candidate recommended by the cardinals. Cather describes the garden setting in great detail. It is carved into the mountains overlooking Rome. The setting is refined and cultivated, underscored by the cardinal's tastes for fine wine, gourmet food, and art. As the Catholic Church has become the predominant civilizing element of Europe, so too will it serve to civilize the American Southwest.

The story follows the two priests, Father Latour and Father Vaillantas, as they organize the disjointed religious structure of the southwestern missions. They face a formidable task, made more difficult by powerful priests long in control of the area who are loathe to abandon the corruption into which they have fallen. Working together diligently and with an unshakable faith, they eventually reclaim the region and bring its far-flung communities under the guidance of a single diocese.

The actual course its story takes, however, is less important than the novel’s moving exploration of the human spirit as it is revealed in the two priests. The priests, both men of deep faith and dedication, willingly sacrifice much in the way of personal desires for the sake of the mission they have undertaken, and the book shines with the integrity and nobility of their efforts.

Father Latour is described as a thirty-five-year-old French Jesuit missionary. The French Jesuits are believed by the cardinals to be great organizers. Ferrand predicts that the New Mexico territory will "drink up [Latour's] youth and strength as it does the rain." Latour also will be called upon to make great personal sacrifices, perhaps even becoming a martyr.

Cather’s love for the Southwest is evident throughout the book, and it reverberates in the love the two priests come to feel for the land and its people. Father Vaillant, in particular, is a man of the people—a dedicated priest who is happiest when he is able to minister to those cut off from the Church by distance or circumstance. Father Latour is a reflective man who sees his greatest dream accomplished in the building of a stone cathedral in Santa Fe, a building that combines the Romanesque architectural style of the Old World with the raw building resources of the New. In the novel’s moving final image, it is at the altar of this cathedral that Father Latour is laid after his death.

Death Comes for the Archbishop is rich in unforgettable set pieces and unique secondary characters. Among the book’s most memorable segments is the priests’ encounter with a dangerous man who offers them shelter for the night, fully intending to murder them and steal their mules. They are warned by his Mexican wife, whom they later assist after she, too, has fled. This event leads to an encounter with frontiersman Kit Carson, in an effective blending of fiction and history that typifies the skill with which Cather brings the past to life. Cather foreshadows the color themes she dedicates to the southwestern landscape by describing the dome of St. Peter's as bluish-gray with "a flash of copper light." Later, as the sun sets, Cather describes the sky as "waves of rose and gold." She will eventually use various shades of copper and gold to describe the terrain of New Mexico. In addition, her description of the "soft metallic surface" of St. Peter's contrasts with the hardness of the American frontier depicted by the bishop. Cather also describes the light as both intense and soft, revealing the relative easiness of European life in comparison to the lives of American missionaries.


Ultimately, Death Comes for the Archbishop is, like much of Cather’s work, a tribute to the courage and perseverance of those who settled the American frontier. What Cather evokes so well in her depiction of Father Latour and Father Vaillant is the depth of purpose that led these men, and so many others like them, to leave behind the world they knew and undertake a mission that would transform their lives into an act of faith.

Honoring Christmas

A Christmas Carol 

by Charles Dickens

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”  ― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol




The Book of Proverbs includes this admonition: " The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding." (Proverbs 4:7)
By the final page of A Christmas Carol Ebenezer Scrooge has arrived at that place in his life with the help of the ghost of his former partner Marley and several spirits. These spirits take Scrooge on tours of his past to show him where he went wrong, of the present to introduce him to the joy of the holiday season, and of the future to warn him of what may happen unless he changes. Scrooge learns his lesson well and is transformed into a man with a conscience.

You probably know the story that begins on Christmas Eve: When Scrooge terrorizes his clerk, angrily dismisses two gentlemen collecting for the poor and repulses his nephew, Fred, who invites him to Christmas dinner. At home that evening, Scrooge is confronted by the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley, who warns him against purely materialistic pursuits and tells him that he will be visited in the night by three spirits.

The first spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Past, gives Scrooge a series of visions of his childhood and early manhood. Scrooge sees himself as a neglected child at school, then as an apprentice of Mr. Fezziwig, enjoying warm festivities on Christmas Eve, and finally as a prospering entrepreneur whose fiancée breaks their engagement because Scrooge loves money more than he loves her. The second spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Present, takes Scrooge out onto the streets on Christmas morning to see many happy families and, in particular, the love and warmth of Bob Cratchit’s home. Scrooge is concerned about their crippled child, Tiny Tim, and is informed that Tim will not live to see another Christmas unless circumstances change. Finally, the spirit deposits Scrooge into Fred’s home, where Scrooge sees good friends enjoying one another’s company and is reluctant to depart when the ghost tells him it is time to move on.

The final spirit, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is shrouded in black, with only a hand showing. It first takes Scrooge to the stock exchange, he then witnesses a scene in a junk shop as two women and a man bring in objects plundered from the dead man’s house, even from the death bed, while his body was still there. The spirit then shows Scrooge his stripped bed, with his own body upon it, in his empty house. Upon asking whether anyone will feel emotion at his death, he sees a couple who owe him money; they are relieved and hope that their debt will be transferred to a less relentless creditor. Scrooge has another glimpse of the future: It is the Cratchit home, with Bob Cratchit as a broken man because of the death of Tiny Tim. As Scrooge has one final glimpse of the future—that of his own grave—he pleads with the ghost to assure him that the visions are of what may be, not what will be. It is a new Scrooge who appears to the world upon awakening from this final visit.

Although it was published in 1843, A Christmas Carol remains popular. Although the character of Scrooge is Victorian, his story highlights the importance of being kind, compassionate, and generous to others. These traits are timeless. No matter what era you live in, transforming your character to become a better person is just as important today as it was then. It remains relevant today because readers can identify with its portrayal of Christmas. Being surrounded by family and food, as we see in the Cratchits' celebration of Christmas in Stave Three, is very similar to how the holiday is celebrated today. Very little has changed, making it possible for modern audiences to relate to Dickens' portrayal of Christmas.