Anthony T. Kronman's EDUCATION'S END Mentioned in Inside Higher Ed

On College Costs, Be Careful What You Wish For

By William G. Durden
Inside Higher Ed, December 10, 2007

... If higher education institutions wanted to contain escalating costs and price, they could also look to a second business model that would, in essence, put a “cap” on new knowledge. When American universities were first founded, the course of study was an unchanging corpus of knowledge that was judged finite and comprehensible in its totality. This position was inherited from our European predecessors and practiced there for centuries. In the words of Anthony T. Kronman in his recent book, Education’s End, “The classicist view of antiquity was essentially static. It paid little or no attention to its historical development ….[M]eaning and value of that world …[ resided] … in a set of timeless forms, transparent to the intellect and permanently available as standards of judgment….” Indeed, such a static view of knowledge and its the accompanying “business model” kept cost — and tuition — down by ignoring that pesky cost driver, new knowledge.

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Rachel Herz's THE SCENT OF DESIRE in Detroit Free Press

SHORT TAKES

Detroit Free Press, December 9, 2007

Sweet and sexy, smells connect

You'll never take your nose for granted again once you've read "The Scent of Desire."

Rachel Herz explores what is considered our most mysterious sense, and the one often dismissed as the least important. But, as Herz points out, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. (People who have lost their sense of smell often become dangerously depressed.)

Herz examines the connection between taste and odor and the role smell plays in sexual attraction, as well as its power to evoke long-suppressed memories. But best are the weird facts. "Clean baby" is one of the very few smells every culture agrees is delightful.

For the rest of the article, please click here.

Lou Ureneck's BACKCAST in Boston Globe

On Alaska trip, a father fishes for a way to reconnect with his son
By Chuck Leddy
December 6, 2007, Boston Globe

Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska, By Lou Ureneck St. Martin's, 286 pp., $24.95
more stories like this

"Backcast," by Brookline resident Lou Ureneck, is difficult to categorize and impossible to forget. It might be described as a stunning memoir, a marvelous outdoor adventure, or a breathtaking travelogue that explores the wilds of Alaska and the intricacies of the human heart. Whatever it is, it's wonderful.

The narrative centers on rafting down a river in Alaska, where the author and his teenage son fish. The story flows smoothly from past to present. In Ureneck's skillful hands, time itself is a river that bends in many directions, and the carefully constructed account weaves the deep, dark past with the turbulent present. The river trip seems simple on the surface, but Ureneck dives deep to explore the shipwreck that his life has become. He's just divorced his wife of two decades and grown distant from Adam, his sullen son.

For the rest of the article, please click here.

Lou Ureneck's BACKCAST in Seattle Times

"Backcast" | A father's promise, a boy's reward

By Susan Gilmore
The Seattle Times, Thursday, December 6, 2007

"Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-Fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska"
by Lou Ureneck
St. Martin's Press, 304 pp., $24.95

There must be an easier way for a father to reconnect with his teenage son after a failed marriage than spending thousands of dollars to go to the remote regions of Alaska on a fishing trip.

But then, Lou Ureneck was a fisherman. No matter that he'd never been to Alaska before, and the fact his son was not exactly a willing companion.

Years earlier, when he was on a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University and his son was living with him, Ureneck and his son were sitting at the kitchen table tying trout flies and talking about fishing: "Adam, tell you what. When you graduate from high school, that summer, we'll go fishing in Alaska."

It was an expensive, extravagant promise; with gear, airfare, lodging and guides, it would cost the equivalent of a semester's tuition at a private college.

For the rest of the review, please click here.

David Blight's A SLAVE NO MORE Reviewed in NYT

Freedom Just Ahead: The War Within the Civil War
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Published: New York Times, December 5, 2007

The chaos of Civil War meant only one thing to America’s four million slaves: hope. With armies on the march, and the old social order crumbling, men like John Washington and Wallace Turnage seized the moment and made a break for freedom, issuing their own emancipation proclamations before the fact. They were “quiet heroes of a war within the war to destroy slavery,” as David W. Blight puts it in “A Slave No More.”

A SLAVE NO MORE

Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
By David W. Blight
Illustrated. 307 pages. Harcourt. $25.

Both Washington and Turnage, near contemporaries, wrote vivid accounts of their lives as slaves and the bold bids for freedom that took them across Confederate lines and into the waiting arms of Union soldiers. Recently discovered, both texts have been reproduced by Mr. Blight as written, with misspellings and grammatical errors intact.

Mr. Blight, a professor of American history at Yale and the author of “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” has also provided an extended preface that provides historical context, fills in biographical gaps and extends the life stories of both men past the Civil War, when their manuscripts break off abruptly, to their deaths in the early 20th century. Two remarkable lives, previously lost, emerge with startling clarity, largely through the words of the principal actors themselves.

For the rest of the article, please click here. Blight—as well as two descendants of John Washington—was also interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday.

Interview with Dr. Rachel Herz, author of Scent of Desire on Nerve.com

Brut Force
An expert on "smell psychology" describes how the fragrance industry has ruined modern mating.
by Catrinel Bartolomeu
Nerve.com, November 27, 2007

When I made out with Matt behind the arts-and-crafts building the summer after eighth grade, his breath smelled like tennis balls. Then, a few years ago, I opened a can of tennis balls close to my face and caught a whiff of that rubbery glue. I immediately remembered Matt's sharp, speckled cheekbone lit by a fluorescent light. I liked making out with him then, I like the memory of it today, and I play tennis often.

This phenomenon is explained in The Scent of Desire, a new book by Rachel Herz, a psychologist widely recognized as the world's leading expert on the influences of smell. Using everything from cognitive-behavioral techniques to MRIs, Herz explains how our olfactory abilities help determine who we date, who we dump and what we buy, be it the directionless unemployed loser we can't stop thinking about, the gorgeous heart surgeon who repulses us, or the strawberry-scented car freshener that, for some reason, turns us on every time we slide into our hatchback. — Catrinel Bartolomeu

Your book is the first scholarly study I've read that talks about the phenomenon of breaking up with someone because of their smell. I've actually ended relationships for that reason. It's a relief to have that validated.
Our body odor is the external manifestation of our immune system. The immune-system match is particularly important for women because they have a huge cost to bear in terms of the time and energy it takes to reproduce. If the goal is to go forth and multiply, you want to make sure that any child you have is going to survive and reproduce, and the most important thing in that respect is that they're healthy. But there's no Brad Pitt of body odor — it's about the fit between your immune system and somebody else's. His immune system can't be too close to yours because it might pair up something bad. Women's sensitivity to scent is highest during ovulation, when it's most important that you're making the correct choice. But this is all thrown out of whack if you're on the pill.

Lou Ureneck and BACKCAST on NPR

Alaska Trip Helps Heal Father and Son in 'Backcast'
Weekend Edition Saturday, December 1, 2007 ·

Listen Here.

For Lou Ureneck, an Alaska fishing trip tested not just his survival skills, but the survival of his frayed relationship with his son.

The author of Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska traveled to Alaska in 2000. The trip was an attempt to heal his relationship with his teenage son, Adam, following a bitter divorce. Ureneck's journey helped him reflect on his parenting skills and on the gaping hole his own father left when he abandoned Ureneck at age 7.

For the rest of the story, please click here.