Book Review
Jesus, Paul
& Socrates
Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher
Education
by Jeffrey Hart
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001
(271 pages; $26.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Preston Jones
So, what do you want to do when you grow up?” The question was put to me by a professor at the California State University, San Bernardino, when I was an undergraduate. This was several years before Samuel Huntington wrote his Foreign Affairs article and ensuing book on the “clash of civilizations” and long before I would read things like the article in the November 2002 Atlantic Monthly, where Charles A. Kupchan wrote that “the coming clash of civilizations will . . . be . . . within a West divided against itself.” Probably sporting a dumb smirk, I said, “I want to drink a lot of coffee and narrate while Western civilization implodes.”
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Preston Jones teaches history at John Brown University.
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