Summer Reading Blues Antidotes

Accuracy in Academia ^ | June 18, 2010 | Malcolm A. Kline

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Summer Reading Blues Antidotes

Malcolm A. Kline, June 18, 2010

Not content to rest on their laurels for the summer break after nine solid months of no-thrill drills, college faculty and administrators try to keep their charges from getting rusty over the summer break. Although one third of the summer is nearly over, Accuracy in Academia would like to offer some summer reading suggestions to fill in the gaps left by university recommendations.

Dutch Country Educational Drama

Call it a mystery with a moral but first-time novelist John DeFrank delivers both with stunning success in Condemned to Freedom, set in a public school in the Pennsylvania Dutch Country.

It is a milieu DeFrank knows well, having spent three decades plus as a teacher/counselor/administrator in the Lebanon County school system in the keystone state.

When a school superintendent is found dead by a hand or hands other than his own, there are, as DeFrank shows us, no shortage of suspects but the clues unearthed by the local and state police point to one—an iconoclastic football coach turned guidance counselor.

Condemned to Freedom is well-constructed and paced with skillfully developed characters. Moreover, DeFrank’s points about honor and responsibility are well taken, especially at a time when adolescence among public figures from across the political spectrum seems to segue right into middle-age. (A full review of this title will appear on this page on Tuesday).

What Would Buckley Do? ...

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http://www.amazon.com/William-F-Buckley-Jr-Movement/dp/193519173X
“William F. Buckley, Jr.: The Maker Of A Movement”

http://www.academia.org/what-would-buckley-do/
“As well, Edwards brings to life the conflict between the committed Catholic Buckley and the adamantly atheist Ayn Rand. “When Buckley first met Rand, her first words to him, heavily accented by her native Russian tongue, were, ‘You ahrr too intelligent to believe in Gott,’” Edwards writes. “For the next two to three years, Buckley sent the Russian-born writer postcards in liturgical Latin.”

“But levity with Miss Rand was not an effective weapon,” Buckley later wrote.”