Stefan Kanfer, former book review editor and senior editor for Time magazine, writes widely for City Journal on political, social, and cultural topics. He is the author of more than a dozen books, among them The Last Empire, the story of the De Beers diamond company; Stardust Lost, about the Yiddish Theater in America; biographies of Groucho Marx, Marlon Brando, Lucille Ball and Humphrey Bogart; plus novels and thrillers.
News item: Massachusetts Elementary School Librarian rejects First Lady’s gift of Dr. Seuss books, calling them “racist propaganda.” The things that you learn when you go back to school Some of them hard, but a lot of them cool Like ways you can measure the height of a tree And who first established the land of […]
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This is a generation that faces new challenges. You are not millennials, not Gen Xers, you are quite literally in a class by yourselves—the class of 2017. All around us we see changes we never expected, changes that demand acceptance—or “resistance.” There are economic and political alterations in Europe, Asia, the Middle East. They are […]
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Harvard University has just made another of its weathervane decisions, based on the prevailing academic winds. This time out, the English Department has announced that the new curriculum will focus on authors who have been “marginalized for historical reasons.” The decision was made, according to James Simpson, Chairman of said department, in response to a […]
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As revisionist histories go, The Forgotten Man went—straight to the NY Times bestsellers list in 2009. The book stayed there for months, even though it differed from the received wisdom of academia, and the lockstep opinion of the mainstream media. Indeed, Amity Shlaes’s pellucid chronicle of the Great Depression became successful because it rejected the […]
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Enthusiastically aided by Academia, the late 20th century saw such English Lit stalwarts as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and the Lake Poets dismissed as passé. In their place came the likes of Alice Walker, Rigoberta Menchu and Amy Tan, some talented, others fraudulent, but all with impeccable credentials: they were neither dead nor […]
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In 1895, H. G. Wells concocted an imaginary time machine that hurled people into the future and back to the past. Since then, that device has been re-invented by sci-fi writers, film makers and scientists. They needn’t have bothered. The time machine has already been in existence for more than four hundred years. It’s called […]
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The influential website Campusbooks displays a roster of “Popular Classics Textbooks” in fiction. The list offers an aperture into the minds of University English departments: Catch 22 by Joseph Heller Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Animal Farm by George Orwell The Rum Diary by Hunter S.Thompson Lord of the Flies by William Golding To […]
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Thomas C. Foster’s book is three years old, but it still holds the gold medal for Turnoff Title of the New Millennium: How to Read Novels Like a Professor. The author, who teaches English at the University of Michigan, attempts to sanitize his work with the subtitle, A Jaunty Exploration of the World’s Favorite Literary […]
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The Chronicle of Higher Education has just added a new nail to the coffin of American Academia. Lax admission policies, politically correct texts, underpaid assistants who do the teaching in place of the big name professors busy on their next books, incompetent management, to name just a few liabilities, are wrecking the once-proud reputation of […]
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In every Marx Bros. movie, there occurs a moment when Harpo works himself up to a frenzy, hyperventilating, jumping up and down and crossing his eyes. These interludes never fail to beguile the viewer, even though they have nothing to do with the plot. I was reminded of these Harpovian shenanigans when I came across […]
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By Stefan Kanfer In full-page newspaper ads, the Kindle displays the first page of an e-book. Its opening is famous: “I am an invisible man.” Or is it famous anymore? How many high school seniors—or for that matter college undergraduates—can identify Ralph Ellison’s novel? True, the author was an African-American, but he was a male […]
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“I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior.” – Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall, 1928 Those were the days. A novelist could teach for a year or two and emerge with enough satire to fill a library. Alas, the Academy […]
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