A Student’s Guide to Classics, by Bruce S. Thornton
A Student’s Guide to Classics, by Bruce S. Thornton, ISI Books, 2003.
Bruce Thornton’s crisp and informative A Student’s Guide to Classics provides readers with an overview of each of the major poets, dramatists, philosophers, and historians of ancient Greece and Rome. Including short bios of major figures and a list of suggested readings, Thornton’s study guide is unparalleled as a brief introduction to the literature of the classical world.
Bruce S. Thornton‘s books include Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization, and Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age. He is Professor of Classics and Humanities in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at California State University, Fresno.
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A Student’s Guide to Economics, by Paul Heyne
A Student’s Guide to Economics, by Paul Heyne, ISI Books, 2000.
What is economics and what can you expect to learn from studying it? In this study guide, Paul Heyne, for many years one of America’s most respected free-market economists, asks this question as his starting point. The story of the progress of economic thought—as embodied in the methods and theories of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich von Hayek, James Buchanan, and other influential scholars—provides Heyne with the material for an effective demonstration of the power and promise of the economic way of thinking.
Paul Heyne (1931-2000) was Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Washington, where he had worked since 1976. Revered as an outstanding teacher, in his writing he specialized in ethical criticisms of economic systems and the history of economic thought. His best-known work is The Economic Way of Thinking, an important and popular introductory economics textbook now in its ninth edition.
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A Student’s Guide to Literature, by R. V. Young
A Student’s Guide to Literature, by R. V. Young, ISI Books, 2000.
This study guide takes up the following questions: In a time of mass culture and pulp fiction, can great literature still be discerned, much less defended? Why is literature so compelling? What should we read? Literary scholar R. V. Young addresses these timely issues in this guide to Western literature and poetry. He demonstrates that literature liberates the mind from cultural and temporal provincialism by expanding our intellectual and emotional horizons. Learn how great fiction and poetry are integral to a liberal education, and visit the classic works of literature again — or for the first time.
R. V. Young is Professor and Director of Graduate Programs in the Department of English at North Carolina State University. He is the author of At War with the Word: Literary Theory and Liberal Education (ISI Books) and co-founder and joint editor of the John Donne Journal. His other books are Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age, a bilingual edition of Justus Lipsius’s Principles of Letter-Writing (with M. Thomas Hester), and Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Literature.
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A Student’s Guide to Philosophy, by Ralph M. McInerny
A Student’s Guide to Philosophy, by Ralph M. McInerny, ISI Books, 1999.
This study guide examines the following questions: Who is a philosopher? Can philosophical thought be avoided? What have philosophers written over the ages? And why should we care? In this critical essay, these and other questions are posed and answered by one of America’s leading philosophers, Ralph M. McInerny of the University of Notre Dame. Schools of thought are examined with humor and verve, and the principal works of philosophers and scholars are recommended.
Ralph M. McInerny is Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies and Director of the Jacques Maritain Center at the University of Notre Dame. A prolific writer, he is the author of many scholarly books, including The Logic of Analogy, Aquinas on Human Action, and The Question of Christian Ethics. His internationally famous novels, the Father Dowling Mysteries, have been serialized for television.
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A Student’s Guide to the Core Curriculum, by Mark C. Henrie
A Student’s Guide to the Core Curriculum, by Mark C. Henrie, ISI Books, 2000.
College students today have tremendous freedom to choose the courses they will take. With such freedom, however, students face a pressing dilemma: How can they choose well? Which courses convey the core of an authentic liberal arts education, transmitting our civilizational inheritance, and which courses are merely passing fads? From the smorgasbord of electives available, how can students achieve a coherent understanding of their world and their place in history? In a series of penetrating essays, A Student’s Guide to the Core Curriculum first explains the value of a traditional core of studies in Western civilization and then surveys eight courses available in most American universities which may be taken as electives to acquire such an education. This study guide puts “the best” within reach of every student.
Mark C. Henrie is Editor of the Intercollegiate Review: A Journal of Scholarship and Opinion and Senior Editor of Modern Age: A Quarterly Review. He holds degrees from Dartmouth, Cambridge, and Harvard.
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A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning, by James V. Schall
A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning, by James V. Schall, S.J., ISI Books, 2000.
This study guide is an inviting conversation with a learned scholar about the content of an authentic liberal arts education. It surveys ideas and books central to the tradition of humanistic education that has fundamentally shaped our country and our civilization. This accessible volume argues for an order and integration of knowledge in order that meaning might be restored to the haphazard approach to study currently dominating higher education. Freshly conveying the excitement of learning from the acknowledged masters of intellectual life, this study guide is also an excellent blueprint for building one’s own library of books that matter.
James V. Schall, S.J., is professor in the Department of Government at Georgetown University. He is the author of numerous books, including Another Sort of Learning; At the Limits of Political Philosophy; Reason, Revelation, and the Foundations of Political Philosophy; Idylls and Rambles; and Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes.
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Richard A. Posner, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency
Richard A. Posner, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, Oxford University Press, 2006.
Eavesdropping on the phone calls of U.S. citizens; demands by the FBI for records of library borrowings; establishment of military tribunals to try suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens–many of the measures taken by the Bush administration since 9/11 have sparked heated protests. In Not a Suicide Pact, Judge Richard A. Posner offers a cogent and elegant response to these protests, arguing that personal liberty must be balanced with public safety in the face of grave national danger.
Critical of civil libertarians who balk at any curtailment of their rights, even in the face of an unprecedented terrorist threat in an era of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, Posner takes a fresh look at the most important constitutional issues that have arisen since 9/11. These issues include the constitutional rights of terrorist suspects (whether American citizens or not) to habeas corpus and due process, and their rights against brutal interrogation (including torture) and searches based on less than probable cause. Posner argues that terrorist activity is sui generis — it is neither “war” nor “crime”–and it demands a tailored response, one that gives terror suspects fewer constitutional rights than persons suspected of ordinary criminal activity. Constitutional law must remain fluid, protean, and responsive to the pressure of contemporary events. Posner
stresses the limits of law in regulating national security measures and underscores the paradoxical need to recognize a category of government conduct that is at once illegal and morally obligatory.
One of America’s top legal thinkers, Posner does not pull punches. He offers readers a short, sharp book with a strong point of view that is certain to generate much debate.
