I'll be there!

If Satyricon is not enough Petronius for you, I highly recommend Quo Vadis, in which he is a main character. I recently finished listening to it, courtesy of Audible.com. 

Kahlua milkshake
2 oz Kahlua
2 scoops of vanilla (or chocolate) ice cream
Splash of milk

Or, if I'm feeling fancy, milkshake with Kahlua, Bailey's, and Frangelico. Yum! 

This looks like something that Bertie Wooster would try to pull off. I would love to see Jeeves's face!

Thank you for this post. I have been an admirer of Donald Kagan ever since I read On the Origins of War and Preservation of Peace for History of the Western World I & II during my freshman year at Patrick Henry College. It is interesting to learn about his intellectual journey since the 1960s. I'm sure he will be sorely missed at Yale. Do you know whether he plans to continue to write?

Real Clear Politics

Try reading G. K. Chesterton's introduction to The Pickwick Papers. It's rather good. Here's an excerpt:

"The Pickwick Papers constitute first and foremost a kind of wild promise, a pre-natal vision of all the children of Dickens. He had not yet settled down into the plain, professional habit of picking out a plot and characters, of attending to one thing at a time, of writing a separate, sensible novel and sending it off to his publishers. He is still in the youthful whirl of the kind of world that he would like to create. He has not yet really settled what story he will write, but only what sort of story he will write....But before he wrote a single real story, he had a kind of vision. It was a vision of the Dickens world -- a maze of white roads, a map full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorous market-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures. That vision was Pickwick."

For Fun:
A Hero's Throne by Ross Lawhead - paperback
Ben-Hur by Lew Wallace (it seems appropriate for Easter) - listening while I work
The Silmarillion - on disk in the car

For continuing education:
French for Reading by Karl Sandburg (prep for graduate school at Hillsdale)
Invisible Armies : An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present by Max Boot 

I'll be there. It's probably my last chance to attend a Washington meetup before I head to graduate school at Hillsdale!

I was very sorry to miss the meetup. I had every intention of attending, but I neglected to check my alarm after I got off of my night job and slept until 2 PM instead of the planned 10 AM! Hopefully, I'll be able to meet all of you in May before I head to grad school at Hillsdale in August to begin their doctoral program.

Sometimes there are excellent programs to be found at institutions that have a reputation for being liberal. For example, I know that Dr. Rahe studied under Donald Kagan at Yale. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Kagan'sOn the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace for my History of Western Civilization class while I was in college. Many of the historians I most admire are military historians (e.g. Donald Kagan, Victor Davis Hanson, Max Boot).

I certainly hope your son continues to pursue his dream! His field may become more a niche field, but I suspect that there will still be some excellent colleges that are unhappy with the current PC culture and greatly desire to hire professors with excellent credentials and a traditional approach to history.

Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht (Be still, stop chattering), BWV 211, also known as the Coffee Cantata.

My criteria for buying a book is that it has to be something that I will re-read and share with others. Anything by the following authors falls into these categories (in no particular order):

C.S. Lewis

J.R.R. Tolkien

George MacDonald

Mervyn Peake

Dorothy Dunnett

Dorothy Sayers

P.G. Wodehouse

Arthur Conan Doyle

G.K. Chesterton

Jane Austen

Charles Dickens

Jules Verne

Francis Hodgson Burnett

Gene Stratton-Porter

Alexandre Dumas

Ray Bradbury

Douglas Adams

Ralph Moody

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Arthur Ransome

L.M. Montgomery

Rosemary Sutcliff

Stephen Lawhead

Keith Robertson

Patricia Wrede

Megan Whalen Turner

Patrick McManus

A.A. Milne

Kenneth Graham

Elizabeth Enright

Dorothy Wall

Thyra Ferre Bjorn

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr. & Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

Susanna Clarke

Patrick Rothfuss

And many, many more...

Growing up as a homeschooler in a conservative family, and observing the effects of government regulations on our family's multi-generational small businesses, led me to believe in limited government and social conservatism.  

The intellectual basis for my beliefs, however, began with attending Washington state's first TeenPact class. At TeenPact’s conclusion, I received a copy of Frederic Bastiat’s The Law, which gave me the foundation for an intellectual defense for my belief in limited government.

I might add that I have realized that the books my family read aloud often stressed the importance of independence, ingenuity, and limited government (e.g. Little House series, Little Britches series, Henry Reed series).

One, Two, Three is available on Netflix Instant Stream, if anyone is looking for it.