Bonfire of the Humanities

With humor, lucidity, and unflinching rigor, the acclaimed authors of  Who Killed Homer?  and  Plagues of the Mind  unsparingly document the degeneration of a central, if beleaguered, discipline—classics—and reveal the root causes of its decline. Hanson, Heath, and Thornton point to academics themselves—their careerist ambitions, incessant self-promotion, and overspecialized scholarship, among other things—as the progenitors of the crisis, and call for a return to “academic p