Martha Franks’ Books without Borders: Homer, Aeschylus, Galileo, Melville and Madison Go to China is an account, a vivid narrative, of education actually taking place in the classroom day by day, month by month. Ms. Franks steadfastly and unpretentiously brings to her students a form of education directed not at passing standardized tests but at considering timeless questions such as, ‘What is the best life?’ ‘Does human suffering have any meaning?’ ‘What is justice and how can it be realized?’ At the same time, Ms. Franks portrays her own education through her reading of Chinese classics and travels to sites such as the Forbidden City, the Palace of Heaven, the Great Wall, and the Lecture Hall and Grave of Confucius. Ms. Franks brings her narrative to a close with these words: “There would be no wrapping up into a neat bundle of certainty—that’s not what the liberal arts are about. Instead, I hoped that in some future I could not imagine these students would carry a memory of our time together and hear, always, all their lives, that it matters what they feel, think, and believe.” To whom does it matter? To all of us. The stakes are high.

Books without Borders: Homer, Aeschylus, Galileo, Melville and Madison Go to China

Travel

Franks, Martha

Asia

Respondeo Books

account of a trip across Africa from Morocco to Tanzania 1995

Travels in Africa: A Year by Land Rover Through the Great Continent

History

Abramowitz, Fred

Africa

“We are greatly indebted to Scott Lee, the distinguished and longtime leader of the Association of Core Texts and Courses, for this insightful exploration of the possibilities and problems of liberal arts education, which draws upon his addresses and conversations across many decades, colleges, and nations. Lee's distinctive analysis, straddling the realms of ‘rhetoric’, ‘dialectic," and “poetic,” illuminates the neglected interconnections among ‘art,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘invention,’ which shape, he argues, the very nature of the liberal arts. The reader will be informed and inspired by each of the essays in this important volume.”—Bruce A. Kimball, Emeritus Academy Professor The Ohio State University For too long the liberal arts have been neglected or diminished for other, seemingly more important, concerns in advocating liberal education. J. Scott Lee’s penetrating book defends and advances liberal arts education through exploring and understanding the art of liberal arts, invention. Artful invention underlies the uniquely human freedom of the joy of learning, the attractive power of liberal education. Philosophically attuned to the possibilities humans can make for themselves, informed by modern empirical and theoretical studies, Lee probes the liberal arts to open up opportunities for students, faculty, and institutions to change higher education and communities for the better. Whether analyzing Pygmalion, the New Organon, the Adoration of the Magi, or the Poetics, or marshaling data to propose new liberal arts programs, Lee convincingly shows how the art of invention can revitalize liberal education in the 21st century.“This unique volume of speeches and essays deserves reading by anyone seriously interested in thinking about the liberal arts.” —Patrick Malcolmson, Professor Emeritus St. Thomas University

Invention: The Art of Liberal Arts

Education & Teaching

Lee, J. Scott

Higher & Continuing Education

Advance Praise"What a marvel this book is. In taut, lyrical prose shot through with moments of wry humor, Jocelyn Davis brings ancient India to life so thoroughly that the gulf between past and present disappears completely: we feel as if she is telling our own story. Riveting and deeply moving, The Age of Kali is the work of an immensely gifted novelist."-Abigail DeWitt, author of News of Our Loved Ones, Lili, and Dogs"To lovers of the Indian epics, this book is a devious, heretical topsy-turvying of the Mahabharata; to Hindu fundamentalists, dangerous, blasphemous, a book to be burnt; to the general reader, a brilliant, enthralling, complex fantasy that will linger in your mind long after you have finished it."-Krishnan Venkatesh, author of Do You Know Who You Are? Reading the Buddha's DiscoursesIndia's greatest epic, reimagined.The Mahabharata, often called "India's Iliad," tells of several generations of the royal family of Kuru: their ambitions, loves, moral dilemmas, and battles for a kingdom. As tradition has it, the heroes are the five Pandava brothers and their shared wife, Draupadi; the villain is their power-mad cousin, Duryodhana.But what if tradition got it wrong? What if Duryodhana, despite his flaws, were the real hero-with a passionate heart buried under his emotional and physical scars-and the supposedly noble Pandavas were the evil ones? What if Draupadi and the many other women of the tale were rebels behind the scenes? And what if, thanks to a young girl who ferreted out the family secrets and kept them hidden for years, the truth could at last be told?Sweeping, fast-paced, and packed with gripping characters, THE AGE OF KALI turns a famous work of world literature inside out, bringing forth voices long silenced. In the end, three questions remain: Who won? Who lost? And who was to blame?

The Age of Kali

Literature & Fiction

DAVIS, JOCELYN

Genre Fiction

Robert Sacks entered his studies as a student of Jacob Klein and also of Leo Strauss. Throughout the last seven decades Mr. Sacks has devoted himself to Klein’s project of de-sedimentation of our inherited thought, which in more ordinary language means recovering the original questions and moments of insight of the great thinkers of Athens and of Jerusalem—not as intellectual or spiritual heroes, but has essentially human truth-seekers such as we ourselves might be. From Leo Strauss Mr. Sacks learned what close reading of a text means. The essays and lectures in this volume are an astonishing record of the fertile influence of these two mentors on the their author. 
In her Introduction to this collection of Robert Sacks’ works Janet Dougherty writes: “There is a kinship of themes among the writings collected here. The conflict between land and sea recurs persistently in the stories of the Israelites’ emergence from slavery and reappears in Shakespeare’s Tempest, in which Prospero almost explicitly takes on the task of reconciling sea and land, of making peace between the chaos of forces both human and non-human and the demands of political life. Sacks alerts the reader to the need for the solid ground defined by Euclid’s postulates by pretending to demonstrate the trisection of an angle. But we are reminded that ungrounded claims to understanding may represent a possibility of immediate and original knowing we would not want to dismiss. If there is a lesson to be gleaned from these readings taken together, it comes across as something like this: With no return to the sea, to whatever is at the origin of things, life and thought on the solid dry land becomes sterile and once-seen truths are sedimented into prejudice. But without the order of law and rationality, mere assertion—the more forceful the more successful—and even violence itself, rule. The sea and the land are not simply separable. They mutually define one another, not only in the opening Book of Genesis but in human experience.”

Three Wells: Essays and Lectures on the Biblical, Political, Geometrical Mind

Religion & Spirituality

Sacks, Robert D.

Christian Books & Bibles

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