Periodically, we like to share more about what are reading in the Studio. If you’d like to find a good book, you can peruse our lending library. We are routinely refreshing the lending library. Bookmark the page and let us know if you can’t find a title you are looking for. This book review is on a title that we don’t have in our library yet, but it is one that we think you will really like.

Roosevelt Montás, a professor in American Studies at Columbia University, recounts his time as an undergraduate at Columbia University in his book titled Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. The book focuses on those initial opportunities he had to read and discuss great books like The Confessions by St. Augustine and Homer’s The Illiad. Each chapter in this concise autobiography explores the timeless lessons found in the work of Freud, Socrates Gandhi and the aforementioned St. Augustine. With powerful imagery, readers join Montás on a journey relived as he unfolds his experiences as a Dominican immigrant in New York City, a candidate in the Higher Education Opportunity Program of New York, a graduate student and a college professor.

Embedded in Montás’s personal stories of academic setbacks and success is a serious and pointed conversation about the challenging questions facing higher education in our deconstructionist, post-postmodern era. Montás’s guidance is steeped in his experience as an immigrant in the American collegiate system as well as his profound love for the humanities and a crystal clear sense of the power found in education. In distinguishing this power he believes our understanding of education is, perhaps, misplaced. Teaching isn’t, in his words, “putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes.” Instead, Montás suggests “Education takes for granted that sight is there but it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look and tries to redirect appropriately.” Students in all contexts can “see,” and we have a tremendous honor and opportunity in educational settings to shed light on new perspectives and introduce students to new directions. 

In Rescuing Socrates, Montás outlines the importance of a general education frameworks that equip students to first understand the world as it is in order that they may navigate it with confidence and improve it.

If you’d like to read more, you can find Rescuing Socrates on Amazon or Audible.