When I read this book with my wife I was looking for aspokesman for those of us who are now caretakers of much of ournations remaining farmland and water rights. In my case one branch of my family's roots in farming go back to the American Revoultion. The farm I still maintain stretches back 5 generations to a homestead deed from Grover Cleveland. As a family we lost the oldest farm in the Great Depression. My great-grandfather having made enough money in the California gold fields to return relatively well off to the homestead in New York, made the mistake of sending both his sons, my grandfather and my great uncle, to Agriculture School at Cornell University in the 1880's. That training and the usual series of misfortunes left my father a landless orphan who took his chances playing russian roulette for the Army Air Core over Europe in order to earn the right to own land in America again. I now own and maintain my mother's family farm in the west through my work here in California. As we read this book it became clear that Professor Hansen's uniformly negative opinions of the people who now support themselves as professional farmers are truly clouded by his amateur status as a farmer. The sad thing is that he does not see that himself. In case you are wondering, his profession is, after all, that of College professor. In a recent article for American Heritage he points out that he has more invested in books than farm equipment. Worse, he seems to want us to see him as a downtrodden yeoman while he hawks sour grapes about bigger Classics Departments at the Universities on the Coast. Personally, I am doing what I can to preserve the arable land we have left, and I wish we had a Howard Jarvis or a Ron Unz out there who could stop Urban Sprawl, but bellyaching about banking, big farming operations, absentee ownership, and the lack of regulation in the commodities market is probably the most counter-productive thing anyone could do to save farming in the central valley. Nothing, not even collectivizing agriculture, will ever make it possible to succeed by making the lousy farming decisions he attributes to himself in this book. He has simply gone out of business, and this is as it should be. I can certainly agree with his suggestion to close the USDA, but the vilification of agribusiness is simply being used, by him and by others, to dry up the water supply to the valley. Professor Hansen's book will do more to turn productive farmland into college lecture halls than it will ever do to save family farms. After all, people need to make a living during the population explosion. If stone-age hunter-gathering could have supported the population of the world beyond its size 10,000 years ago, it would not have been supplanted by family and tribal agriculture. If the population 150 years ago could have been fed by exports from big cattle ranches, the Mexican Ranchos would not have had to yield to the more advanced technologies of the American Nineteenth century. If the population today could be supported by anything other than international agribusiness it would be doing so. If you, like me and Professor Hansen, are now an amatuer farmer, and are looking for a kindred soul you will not find one in this book, because Dr. Hansen is involved in a sharade that he is unwilling or unable to recognize. For a description of the real effects of the urbanization that necessarily tracks the population explosion read Kim Barnes', In the Wilderness. I would also recommend that one to Professor Dickey. END

A wonderful read. Hanson sweeps the reader up into the the high stakes game, the espirt d'corps of the family farm, the teeter-totter hazards of weather and market demands, the changing fortunes of agrarian culture. A magnificent achievement. One of my favorite books of the last decade.

I read this laughing, smiling, shaking my head in wonder. A pasionate history of the risk and woe of the farmer's life.

Hanson's thesis is that the hoplite class of landowning small family farmers originally created the autonomous city-state, in their own image and to serve their own interests, and thus more than anyone else shaped Greek culture from the time of Homer to that of Alexander. It is a pioneering treatment of an immensely important and hitherto scandalously neglected subject, so that this is a "must read" for any student of ancient Greece. I only wish it were a better read.

Hanson's own oft-cited membership in the family-farmer class can be an asset, since he illustrates in his own voice the characteristic mindset that he also aims to describe: opinionated, pessimistic, and contemptuous of seemingly all non-agrarian institutions, customs, persons, and ways of thinking. But these mental characteristics are also very limiting. Hanson himself admits as much, applying such terms as "narrow" and "chauvinism" to his ancient predecessors; but to see and acknowledge such limitations in them is not necessarily to transcend them himself.

There are several other problems with the book as well. Hanson's passion for his subject all too often overwhelms his organizational planning for the book, as he reiterates favorite points in any and all contexts. He is also excessively given to braving out any inconvenient gap in the available evidence with an imperious "must have" or "could only have". And finally, the dots remain unconnected between the agrarian foundations and the enduring contributions of ancient Greek civilization. At one point, Hanson admits that the artistic and intellectual achievements that we call the "Greek miracle" only arose when and because Athens turned away from the agrarian ideal in various ways. At another, he lists twelve core values that western culture inherited from these ancient agrarians; and though the attribution is plausible enough in this case, the twelve listed values are not what we most treasure in the Greek heritage--except perhaps those among us who regard the Second Amendment as the crown jewel of the Bill of Rights.

This book seems to threaten certain scholars who have difficulty crediting his thesis- that western civilization gained more from the rural than the urban. It threatens long-established anti-rural prejudices. However the scholarship is excellent and ultimately pursuasive.

Over the years I have read many books on the ancient world, but always came away dissatisfied, feeling as if I could not quite grasp what these ancient Greeks were all about. Sure, these books all covered the various battles and the struggle with Persia. They all dealt with Athenian democracy, Spartan militarism, and the various philosophical schools. We all know how the Macedonians eventually put an end to "Greek freedom." But just what was it that made these Greeks so different? How and why did they emerge with a polis culture that gave us so much of our Western heritage? Why were these Greeks so different than the orientals and the Romans? Finally, we have a book that goes a long way in explaining what it was that made the ancient Greeks so unique. At last we have a work that provides some answers as to "what these Greeks were all about."

I would agree with Donald Kagan who wrote, "The Other Greeks, is the most original and important contribution to an understanding of the ancient Greeks I have ever read." Here Victor Hanson explains how the rise of intensive agriculture and the independent farmer put an end to the Greek Dark Ages and he explains why this was an entirely new phenomenon in history. The rise of the polis, this egalitarian community of farmers now producing its own food, fighting its own wars, and making its own laws was something entirely novel in history. This Greek agrarianism became an ideology that infused Greek life with new energy and creativity.

Hanson details how the shift to private ownership and intensive cultivation by individual farmers gave birth to Western values and created the hoplite army. Relying heavily on ancient sources, as well as his personal knowledge of agriculture, he explains how and why the Greek yeoman created the hoplite army and how it functioned. During the polis period there was almost no miltary parasitism in most Greek city-states.

But Hanson does not view the polis through rose- colored lenses. He understands that the polis developed during a period when Greece was left alone by other powers around the Mediterranean world. He is aware of its innate conservatism and the fact that it was not "truly" democratic. The rise of Greek agrarianism, after all, did lead to an increase in slavery in the countryside. And lastly, Hanson deals with the decline of the polis in a world where the Greeks were forced to more and more deal with an opened society and international involvement. The Athenians made the most dramatic and remarkable attempt to adapt the polis culture to the needs of the new age, but, ultimately, the agrarian based polis culture was unfit to the requirements of the new world. The problems of new and wider citizenship and international economics found the polis system wanting. The Hellenistic Age and the conquests of Rome were based on the foundations of Greek culture, but in no way did they recreate the city-state life of ancient Greece. Power, wealth and excess were the hallmarks of the succeeding ages.

If there is any criticism of the book, and I almost hate to offer it considering the great achievement of Hanson, it is that the writing is often repetitious. The reader should be prepared for this. But, I cannot see how anyone can consider themselves well read in the history and culture of ancient Greek without reading this book and considering the points that Victor Hanson has made. A proper understanding of ancient Greece is impossible without a comprehension of what Hanson has given us. We all owe him much for these insights. This book belongs on the shelf of everyone with an interest in the ancient world and its insights will give you a yardstick by which to evaluate other times and cultures. After all, how people make their living is critical to understanding their time and culture.

The review by Joseph Winkler is magnificient. It is everything this book is not: concise, to the point, eloquent, and relevant.

From the title's cheezy ripoff of "Bonfire of the Vanities" to a bizarre sense of their own grandeur, the authors' collection of essays mainly revolves around a bunch of scholars talking to themselves, the oblations on "academic populism" notwithstanding. Considering it is very long and very expensive, it makes one wonder what the real value is. The authors are more interested in taking potshots at their colleagues than in really saying much about the classics or academia as a whole. It is akin to the recent debacle of ALAS, POOR DARWIN, which is a snide effort at criticizing evolutionary psychology that rests on the 'ad hominem.' This book appears to be an effort to be controversial at parties and committee meetings, rather than an attempt to rescue much of anything.

The jacket extols the book as some magnificient tome of an indictment of the university. The self-absorbed epilogue is a great example of what the book is mired in: singling out certain scholars and trying to come up with witty things to say at their expense. Not exactly overwhelming.

The problem for these authors is that they really have nothing to say that hasn't been noted extensively -with infinitely more elegance- by books such as Allan Bloom's, THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, or David Ricci's, THE TRAGEDY OF POLITICAL SCIENCE. These are two among many well written books that criticize the state of the university vis-a-vis the humanities, the social sciences, multiculturalism, and diversity. One's time would be far better spent with them, instead of the pretentious BONFIRE OF THE HUMANITIES.

Classics as an academic discipline, or classical philology, or simply classical studies, as it is also called, is the study of the ancient Greek and Latin languages, the civilizations which spoke these languages, their ideas and philosophies and all the other creations which they left behind in their writings and monuments. Ever since the Renaissance, when Western man first began to look backwards over the gulf of time which came to be known as the Middle Ages, the classical civilizations were seen as a flowering of man's intellectual and creative and ethical and inquiring spirit, a fruition which held meaning for modern man, one worthy of close study and emulation as the source of a better way of fulfilling man's natural role in the world and in the societies he created. Therefore for a long time throughout Europe, and in America too, studying the classics was at the core of an education based in the humanities, those liberal studies which, as their name suggests, free man from the constraints of narrow thinking and open his mind to all that has gone before, of which he is a product, teaching him not what to think, but how to think.

No longer is such the case, and although the decline in teaching and study of the humanities is a general one, classics, a demanding discipline at best, is particularly hard hit, and what was once seen as the revealer of a noble ethic toward which we should aspire is dead or dying, say the authors here in Bonfire of the Humanities, a collection of essays and reviews by three classicists who protest the decline of their profession in the face of an onslaught coming both from outside and from within the profession itself.

The evolution of the university, once a refuge for those who sought objective truths, which then were believed to exist, into a mega-business where careerism and self-promotion are the criteria of excellence, provides the framework in which this decline proceeds. A renewed emphasis on teaching, on revitalizing studies at the undergraduate level, is suggested as one solution to the problem of indifference now projected to aspiring students by a professorial elite, although this reviewer hastens to add that indifference and bad teaching are not new creatures, as one occasionally may infer from the authors, but were certainly alive and well back in the fifties. Within this corporate structure, as society changed over the last thirty years, classics came to be seen as a privileged, white, all-male enclave busily perpetuating the repression and victimization not only of women, but also of every other kind of ethnic and minority group imaginable, and doing so in the name of teaching Western civilization, a concept which is not only no better than any number of other cultural paradigms, but perhaps with its oppressive tactics, not even as good as most, and perhaps more worthy of elimination from the curriculum than of emulation. Thus perhaps following the adage about knowing one's enemy, some with this new and jaundiced view of the classics actually entered the field to become classicists themselves, creating a schism of outlook and purpose within the discipline, where they continue to pursue vigorously a predetermined political agenda which dominates their outlook and pervades their work, the irony being that these self-appointed spokespersons for the downtrodden and oppressed, these radical-chic saviours of those who have been victimized by the classics and by Western civilization, are the most avid practitioners of the careerism and self-promotion afforded by the corporate-like university, where, the authors say, the student is avoided and forgotten. This type is well known to this reviewer from the area of social services, which was invaded in the late sixties by hordes of reformers, characterized by shallow educations, and with overriding political agendas, and although it is difficult to imagine any classicist with a shallow education, perhaps such shallowness can come about when the stream of thinking is filled in by the sediments of excessive ego and politicization. Add to this mixture, say our authors, the new literary theories which have become not only trendy but also the stairways to elevation within the university, where research now is a euphemism for the same old thing said over in new and more obfuscating jargon, and we have completed the final recipe for the decline and fall.

The book's personal revelations are humorous in the context of the academic world, but sad too when one realizes how such behavior reflects the pettiness and disingenuousness of some of its members, who think, as the modern theorists hold, that there is no objective truth, that our texts and values are meaningless, or mean only what we want them to mean, and that therefore perjury cannot be committed or intellectual dishonesty exist. Beleaguered from without and sprinkled within with enough loonieness, a quality which Professor Hanson seems to use in despair when thinking of one of his esteemed colleagues, classics as a discipline seems bombarded by nuts as they fall from the nut tree.

This book deserves a wider readership than probably it will attain, for the problems described are broad and general in scope, not confined even to just the humanities, but reflective of major changes in our society at large and what its concept now is of the university and what it expects from that institution.

Before you pay tens of thousands of dollars to send little Jr. or Jr.ett off to the local state university--READ THIS BOOK!!!

What about when people who are unworthy of education approach philosophy and consort with her unworthily? What kinds of thoughts and opinions are we to say they form? Won't they truly be what are properly called sophisms, things that have nothing genuine about them or worthy of being called true wisdom?
Plato's Republic Bk VI

There is a mountain of evidence from several important books that the past thirty years has seen obvious and measurable decline within the modern American university. Decline of rigorous academic standards, decline of hours full-time professors teach undergraduate students, decline of competent teachers, and decline of full-time teaching faculty within the Humanities.

Many of the claims by the three writers will not settle well with the modern crying sensitive type and demanding everyone to be tolerant (while they are the essence of intolerance.) Heath courageously claims that while some of the glories of the Greeks are unique to the Greeks, "the sins of the West are the sins of mankind and that it's primarily in the West that the spirit of self-criticism has led to an amelioration of these evils."

Several times the author's recognize that the larger cultural and social context of the modern university is part of the problems but not likely at the center of the problems. However, the authors are unrelenting in their case that much of what is wrong within the Humanities is a self-inflicted wound.

What goes on in the name of scholarship that is explicitly and unashamedly narcissistic and is expressed in the language of the "therapeutic multiculturalist Left" and "the self-esteem of the victim du jour" all "lack Thucydidean gravitas", according to Victor Davis Hanson.

The struggles of these scholar-teachers is one that sounds like battles that have raged for centuries but the level of pettiness demonstrated toward them has reached an all time low. There may be another reason so few are teaching within the Humanities and so many hate the "new humanities". If this type of attack is normative, many will be discouraged from the once noble profession of teaching.

The profundity of The Bonfire of the Humanities is that the authors shed light into the cave by utilizing simple logic, close analysis, and bold confrontation common to the greatest of the ancient minds to expose many of the current problems. If the modern reader needs to see not only the effects of the academy's rejection of the classical ways but the true genius of those ways, you need go no further than the essays in this volume.

Mr. Hanson seems to feel there's some particular moral virtue in a style of war where the height of strategy is to put your head down and run at the enemy like a bull at a gate. And that nothing is necessary but righteous enthusiasm.

As the son, grandson and great-grandson of professional soldiers -- mostly in the service of the British Empire -- words cannot express my disdain. My ancestors spent their professional lives butchering just such patriotic agrarian amateurs like sheep.

As the poet put it:

"The 'eathen in 'is blindness Bows down to wood and stone; 'E won't obey no orders Unless they is 'is own -- 'E keeps 'is side-arms sloppy 'E leaves 'em all about. Then up comes the Regiment; An' we punch the 'eathen out!"

In ancient Greece, men dressed themselves in armor, armed themselves with pikes, stood shoulder to shoulder eight ranks deep facing another group of similarly armed and arrayed soldiers, and then charged into each other with homicidal intent. The resulting carnage was horrific. There was no maneuver, no strategy, and little room for skill at arms. Only strength, stamina, and courage mattered.

As bloody and unpleasant as the hoplite battle was, it was really a system designed to limit non-combatant casualties. Only the soldiers on the chosen field of battle exposed themselves to injury while the city-states themselves suffered little behind their stout walls. Hoplite warfare was sort of like settling international disputes by means of a very bloody football game.

The essays in this volume explore all aspects of the very bloody sport that was classical Greek combat. Arms, armament, drill, ritual, and all other appurtenances of Greek warfare are examined exhaustively. There is even a whole chapter devoted to the "salpinx," the Greeks' version of the bugle.

The writing is somewhat uneven (some of the contributors seek to display their extensive vocabulary rather than enlighten the reader) and the work suffers greatly from a dearth of illustrations. Several chapters refer extensively to paintings on pottery, but the pottery isn't depicted in the book. Despite these shortcomings, I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in ancient military history.

If you'd like an overview that doesn't delve quite as deeply into the details of hoplite battle, you might prefer two other works: F.E. Adcock's "The Greek and Macedonian Art of War," and Victor Hansen's "The Western Way of War," both available from Amazon.com.

This book is a collection of nine scholarly essays specifically about the Hoplite soldier: describing their weapons and offensive arms, identification and retrieval of casualties, phalanx battle style (from within), sacrifices and battle rituals, etc. While academic in nature, it was a good read and differed from other books on the subject in that it didn't paradigmatically examine Greek battle in terms of strategy, tactics, politics, or similar macro-issues. Instead, this truly observed the Hoplite soldier from the perspective of a Hoplite soldier as we now understand them. The book wasn't INCREDIBLE, but I feel satisfied that I got my money's worth.

This book has been informative in that I have learned a great deal about the political and militaristic problems Washington endured during America's push for independence. I have a feeling that, without Washington's sacrifice, America as we know it probably wouldn't occur. However, I also think of the famous quote attributed to Napoleon that "History is the myth men choose to believe." While Thomas Paine wrote about independence for the colonies, he also tore into the concept of slavery as immoral, so it wasn't as if no one was talking about this issue. If Washington would have "stepped up" and abolished slavery then and there, so that all men (and women) were truly created equal, as I said before, America might not be here. It was a politically divided and bankrupt country. I don't consider those reasons justification for sacrificing another person's human rights. The racial problems we face today stem from a lack of identity stolen from a stolen people

who did much of the work to build this country in its early days and, while the opprtunity was there, given nothing in return. "Patriot Sage" is an excellent insight into many aspects of Washington's life of which I was ignorant (like his influence on the Constitutional Convention) Sadly, some of its essays are too right-wing, to the point of Clinton bashing. What modern era president could really live up to the accomplishments of the one who defined the job's parameters ? One essay focuses on the moral symbolism of Washington now devoid in today's presidents, while another openly admits he gambled and sought prostitutes. To be read overall with some perspective.