Welcome to the first of an ongoing series of monthly columns I will be writing for Real Clear Books. My hope is to introduce readers to thoughtful and engaging books that, while not obscure or unduly academic, may not get the full attention they deserve. As an avid reader of non-fiction works – and of serious literature, too – I hope to provide comments on recent books that have caught my attention and that speak to both enduring questions as well as the pressing concerns of our time. From time to time, I will also highlight older books, classic and otherwise, that deserve our renewed consideration – or perhaps deserve our serious attention for the very first time. Rather than being solemn or unduly serious, I hope to convey some of the pleasure to be found in coming to terms with books great and good, and others, less choiceworthy perhaps, that still merit our attention.
We live in an age of increasingly narrow intellectual specialization, where academic historians and social scientists – with a few notable, and welcome, exceptions – no longer address themselves to what used to be called the reading public. Such specialization is often combined with indecipherable academic jargon and an ideologically charged hostility to both the American project and to Western civilization as a whole. The exceptions that come to mind – a David McCullough, an Allen Guelzo, or a Gordon Wood – stand out for their clarity and literary felicity, their civic-mindedness, and their refusal to subordinate good writing and historical reflection to the ideological shibboleths of the moment. In that spirit, one cannot do better than to return to the greatest historians at the source of our tradition. In “The Greek Histories: The Sweeping History of Ancient Greece as Told by Its First Chroniclers: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch,” Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm, distinguished classicists in their own right, present well-translated selections from the first chroniclers of classical Greek politics, history, and civilization.
