Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation
(eBooks)

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Hoopla Extract Information

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    [year] => 2021
    [artist] => Roosevelt Montás
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    [titleId] => 15909972
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    [language] => ENGLISH
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    [title] => Rescuing Socrates
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    [pages] => 248
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    [synopsis] => Roosevelt Montás is senior lecturer at Columbia University's Center for American Studies and director of its Freedom and Citizenship Program, which introduces low-income high school students to the Western political tradition through the study of foundational texts. From 2008 to 2018, he was director of Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum. He lives in New York City. Twitter @rooseveltmontas 
	A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life-and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds

What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities.

Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University's renowned Core Curriculum, one of America's last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career-he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college.

Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors-Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi-had a profound impact on Montás's life. In doing so, the book drives home what it's like to experience a liberal education-and why it can still remake lives. "Rescuing Socrates is a warm, appealing narrative of how it feels to be 'thrust into a conversation' with fellow students about life's most 'serious and unsettling questions.'"---Martha Bayles, Wall Street Journal "[A] combination memoir and call to arms. . . . Despite those who claim that these are merely works by dead, possibly irrelevant white men, Montás argues that the Great Books approach has a fundamentally democratizing impulse."---John McWhorter, New York Times "Thanks to Montás . . . Socrates had a good 2021."---George F. Will, Washington Post "[An] earnest defense of the humanities, which is also a personal testament to the power of a liberal education."---Thomas Chatterton Williams, The Atlantic "One can only hope that Rescuing Socrates rescues others as well."---Naomi Schaefer Riley, Commentary "Montás undertakes his defense of the great books with simplicity and humility. . . . In the face of public conversations marked by fear, anger, and hostility, Montás chooses the path of vulnerability. In that, he shows the wisdom of a person who has navigated real conflict, away from the seminar table."---Zena Hitz, Commonweal Magazine "This is an important, and timely, book about why the western canon still matters and about how great books can change lives, especially impoverished black and brown ones."---Lindsay Johns, Times Literary Supplement "A heartbreakingly honest immigrant tale of displacement, loss, wrenching readjustment and self-discovery, this book also offers a gripping account of how participation in the great conversation over justice, ethics, citizenship and the nature of the good life can subvert hierarchies of privilege, redeem lost souls, open minds and transform lives."---Steve Mintz, Inside Higher Ed "Rescuing Socrates is a valuable and thoughtful book bot
    [url] => https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/15909972
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    [subtitle] => How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation
    [publisher] => Princeton University Press
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