Free Republic

The classics are classics for a reason and offer valuable, time-worn lessons about humanity itself.We were excited to see the sign at the Lansing Mall: Barnes and Noble Booksellers. My roommate and I, on our spring break excursions, were shopping in another city when we spotted the national bookselling chain. We envisioned a long hour of perusing the great books — from Cicero to Tolstoy, Shakespeare to Dickens, Plato to Faulkner. My roommate joked she never made it out of a bookstore without purchasing at least one volume.After walking through a maze of board games, Harry Potter paraphernalia, and $10...

Removing time-tested classics and assigning easy fiction with leftist themes fails in cultivating any love of reading in the students that need it most.Burbank Unified School District in California recently made headlines with its decision to ban the classic novels “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Of Mice and Men,” “The Cay, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” District leaders apparently responded to several complaints from parents who took issue with the purported racism of the books as well as incidents of white students taunting their nonwhite peers with racist language from their assigned reading. Yet,...

'Little Women' is so important and transcends each generation because it captures the differences between women — in personalities, desires, and fortunes. Greta Gerwig's rendition didn't quite cut it. “Little Women” is a timeless story that should make you cry. For goodness sake, Beth dies. The fact that I wasn’t a bit emotional watching the latest retelling of the classic story is quite concerning, and even more so, disappointing. Greta Gerwig’s new version left me completely devoid of feeling, although the story is full of it.In fact, two other recent adaptations — Clare Niederpruem’s modern adaptation of “Little Women” (2018)...

Fahrenheit 451: A Book Review By Philip Cottraux I’ve written two reviews of dystopian future novels, 1984 and Brave New World (click the links to read). This week I decided to tackle Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. The story behind its authorship is almost as fascinating as the book itself; it took years for Bradbury to complete, working feverishly in garages and library basements during his spare time (he admitted in the book’s epilogue that he never quite completed a final story). Although written during the backdrop of the Cold War, it proved to be one of the most prophetic...