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“The truth is not a democratic value,” Anthony Kronman says on this week’s podcast. “We don’t decide what the truth is in mathematics or philosophy or history by asking for a show of hands.”
Kronman was dean of Yale Law School from 1994 to 2004, and his new book is “The Assault on American Excellence.” The book laments the politicization of academic life.
“When the egalitarian and democratic values that have an entirely proper place in the political sphere seep into the academy — or maybe I should say are imported wholesale into the academy — they compromise and undermine the objective standards that the search for truth assumes,” Kronman says.
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Christopher Benfey visits the podcast this week to discuss his new book, “If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years.” which looks at Rudyard Kipling’s time in the United States, which intersected with Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt and other notables of the day. “By the 1920s, the Bloomsbury writers were not thrilled by Kipling,” Benfey says. “His American reputation is a little bit different, and for me the big retrieval process was to find that American Kipling. Some of Kipling’s greatest critics, greatest appreciators, were American.”
Also on this week’s episode, Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal and Jennifer Szalai talk about the books they’ve recently reviewed. Pamela Paul is the host.
Here are the books discussed by The Times’s critics this week:
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to books@nytimes.com.
