interesting insider interviews with publishing industry experts. we'll also give you updates on current nonfiction authors and books. the latest book reviews. and we'll talk about the current nonfiction and books featured on c-span spook tv. and now a discussion on the great books of western civilization. according to michael knowles, he hosts a program and podcast called the book club for prager, u. here's a portion a book club. yeah. is a fabulous thing. like books. i was making fun of you that you have a book club with a bookshelf with no books, sort of sparse. it's a new show, you know? but but, you know, i'm reminded of the opening of the princess bride in my time. television was called books. and in this case, books. yes. it's called podcast. that's right. so it's all a continuum. so i have to admit, when when

when you ask me to do this and you and i do our verdict podcast together every week, that's a good chance to come and do your podcast. but we talked about different topics to do. and the last time i read brave new world, i was 13. so i remember it well because i read it in the year 1984. i was in eighth grade and my eighth grade teacher, mr. wall, he thought it was very clever to assign 1984. in 1984. right. and we read 1984. we read brave new world or we read animal farm and and if you want a stunning indictment of soulless, godless, totalitarian domination, read any of those three or ideally all of those three. so michael knowles, what did we just see? you just saw one little peek into the book club on prager. you that happened to be with my friend senator cruz.

we do a show every single month and the show is truly a book club. i mentioned that he's my friend because most of the guests that we have on are personal friends of mine. most of the books that we do are suggestions by the guests who who we will approach. and we'll say, hey, i'd like to have you on the show. what do you want to read? and they'll say, you know, my favorite book either from a year ago or my favorite book from when i was 12 years old is x, y, z. and i just want to cover it. and so the show is not a college lecture. the show is not some rigorous, purely scholarly analysis of of some great work. it's it's really a show about the love of books and the love of the culture that these books reflect and imbue in us in our in our society. so senator cruz picked aldous huxley's brave new world. he did. and senator cruz had not read

the book for some time. that was another one where, as you heard him say, he read it in school, hadn't read it since. but because senator cruz is supremely nerdy when it comes to these sorts of things, especially books, he was flying back from some either campaign event or maybe was from washington, and he cleared his schedule to reread the book on the plane to annotate the book on his kindle app. and then we actually had to wait about an hour before filming that episode because senator cruz was so insistent that he copy over all of his electronic notes into the hardcover so that he didn't miss any of the points. and this is actually my favorite part of the show. one, it gives me the opportunity to get the education that i completely neglected when i was in school, both both in high school and in college. i was probably out hanging out with my friends when i should have been doing a little bit more of my reading. and so it gives me an opportunity to read that and to read books that weren't even presented to me in the school.

but but it also gives an opportunity to see what motivates your friends and to see what books have not only made them think about something a little bit differently, but have really shaped their lives, shaped their desires, shaped the way that they view the world and the way that they view themselves. now, where did the idea for the book club come from? the book club was totally originated by our friends over at prager. you. my day job is at the daily wire. prager, you destroy early is a book club for me in that it's sort of like a hobby. it's a hobby that's been going on for a year now. and we've read many, many books on it. but our friends over at prager u came to me one day. they said, michael, we have this idea for a show, and i know you got your show at daily wire, and i know you do your show with senator cruz. but this one, i think you're really going to like. in fact, i think you'd probably do this show for free. you're just going to read whatever books you want once a month, and we're going to post them on prager u 25 minutes. we're going to have it be completely digestible. we're going to just talk about

why you love this book, why why your friends love this book, and why people of all ages, whether they're ten years old or whether they're 50 years old, should read these books. i think what. prager you realized was that today many schoolchildren are graduating without having read the great works of our culture. and part of this is because of the rise of political correctness and a general hostility to the western canon that's been brewing since the 1980s. so for for the purposes of political correctness curricula, we'll see the great works replaced by more fashionable or politically activist works. and this is a great shame because every second that one wastes reading some shallow political diatribe is a is a second that one could have been reading shakespeare or one could have been reading tolstoy. and so that's one of the reasons for that. but but it's also important because most people don't get their most meaningful education in the classroom.

if if school succeeds in anything, it will be in stimulating a love of learning in you such that you graduate at 18. maybe you go to college, graduate at 22, maybe even get an advanced degree, graduate at 25 or 26. you've got the rest of your life ahead of you. there is no way that you are going to read all the great works of the civilization in ten or 12 years. it's just not going to happen. and if you do happen to succeed at that, you are not going to have taken everything out of them that you should. and so really, your education and in a way it sort of begins when you graduate school. and this is a way of continuing that whether you're on the job and you pop in an earbud to listen to the book club, whether you we've had people write in who are sitting on tractors in the middle of the country or maybe you're in school studying these books right now and you want a perspective that is not not hostile, is not politically activist, that really just gets to to what the books tell us about our culture and why the

books have had such an effect on our culture. so, michael knowles, do you ever assign one of these what you call great books of western civilization to a guest? or does a guest have full editorial control? i make suggestions, but i never force anybody to do a book in large part because i find that the conversations with someone to whom i have simply assigned a book are just not going to be as good. yes, i'm interested in the plot of the book. yes, i'm interested in the broadly accepted commentary about the book. but i can do that. i can easily recite in much less than 25 minutes the plot of a story and why it's had some significance. what i want is the desire. what i want is to know how it's personally affected somebody, why it speaks to somebody, how this kind of a work could make somebody tick. one of my very favorite episodes of the book club was with a friend of mine who is a young dante scholar, catherine illingworth.

and we covered the divine comedy. we went a little over 25 minutes. we had to get through three canticle. it's a very long poem, but we went through the whole thing. we probably did it in about 45 minutes, and i think that the divine comedy is an exemplary book for the book club because of the divine comedy is about desire, even as dante and virgil are heading by the river, as they're about to enter into hell. they notice that the shades that are dammed now, they've they've died. they're going into hell. they seem eager to cross over into hell, proper. and you read this and you think, wait a second, why are these people eager to get across the river to their eternal torment and damnation? and it's because what dante is telling us is that hell is not simply the punishment for when you do naughty things, but hell is a logical consequence of disordered desires. and c.s. lewis has made this point. we've covered c.s. lewis on the book club that that people get what they want in this life or the next. people tend to get what they

want. and so so one of the objects, probably the most important object of education is not just to fill our head with a bunch of facts, but it is to cultivate our will and cultivate our desires so that we desire things that are edifying, that will lead lead us to have a flourishing life, rather than to to disregard our rational will and allow our our base passions and appetites to run away with us. so how do you define a great book of western civilization? well, i define it for the purposes of this show a little bit differently than i would define it if i were teaching a course at a university. i guess i am teaching a course at prager university. i'm a tenured professor there, but i'm talking about a four year kind of school where you spend a quarter million dollars instead of these five minute videos that you get for free. the the great book definition that you would get out of a university is probably something like you would read in in a harold bloom commentary. here is the canon going all the way back to plato and aristotle,

little and virgil going all the way up to the modern philosophers. you've got works of literature and history and philosophy and poetry and all the rest of it mixed in there. we're a little bit looser about this book club. i am not just going systematically through all of the ages, through all of the very fine canonized writers. we're throwing books in there that people just happen to like. larry elder really likes a book by somerset maugham. okay, throw it. i think somerset maugham is a very fine writer, but i'll throw that in there. somebody likes a book, by gosh. i don't know plato or spenser. claiborne wants to read the symposium. okay, great. we'll do plato. plato certainly, certainly would count as a great book. maybe a scientist named brian keating decides he wants to cover galileo. the dialog concerning the two great world systems. okay, throw that in there too. we're hopping around everywhere. there is. there is no rhyme or reason, really, other than the love of books. and it can be the kind of book that a 12 year old would read. it could be it could be animal

farm. it could be a relatively simple book, or it could be some of the most complicated literature and philosophy that's ever been written. we'll cover it all as long as people are eager to read it and to learn something not only about their culture, but about perhaps eternal truths that those cultures are are looking toward. so tell us a little bit about the conversation between you and larry elder on of human bondage. this was a book that i did not see coming. this is sometimes i make the mistake of of giving my guests free rein, and then they tell me a week before we're shooting that you're going to read an 800 page book that you you have no familiarity with. and you say, well, okay, there go my nights this week. but this was a book that larry elder had read. i think it was 30 years may have even been 40 years before we did our episode. and what was so amazing before our episode is that larry had not reread it. very often the guests will have

a little refresher before they go do it. larry said, nope, i'll sit down and do it. and so during the episode, larry asked me. he said, okay, what happened exactly on this plot point? oh, right. yes, it was. that. and then he would just start quoting it clearly. this book had had such and such an impression on him, especially for someone like larry, who is deeply concerned with freedom, freedom and bondage. and larry is not only a conservative, but a libertarian leaning conservative. and so somerset maugham is not writing some political diatribe. he's writing he's writing a novel, but it touches on these kinds of themes. and so these big questions then will pop up out of out of a novel. what is the nature of liberty? is liberty the ability to do whatever you want? or is liberty the right to do what you ought to do as as lord acton poses this question. these are questions that crop up throughout all of western history. and so i think it can be really helpful when people are trying to just get a grapple, just a hold on their culture.

when we read much less than we have in the past, when our attention spans are about the same as that of a fruit fly, these days, it it can it can put us on the right path when we realize that some of the same questions that plato and aristotle were raising. well, these are the questions that shakespeare is grappling with. these are the questions that tolstoy is grappling with. these are the questions that george eliot is grappling with, for that matter, or any even more modern writer that these keep, keep cropping up and that there is a coherence to it, that there is a through line in our culture. so, michael knowles, is it a fair critique to say that the book club focuses on dead white european male dred dead, white, european male? i suppose so, because the the greatest writers in history in our civilization tend to be dead just. it's an old civilization and they tend to be white. we're talking about europe, mostly white people. i happen to come from the sicilian people, which is an

ethnically ambiguous, liminal people, but broadly they're considered white, tend to be men. the writers tend to be men, though not all of them. we've covered plenty of women writers on the show. i just mentioned one of them who happens to have a man's name, george eliot and. they tend to be christian, though they're not, certainly not exclusively christian. in fact, the first book that we we launched with was man's search for meaning with dennis prager, that great, great book by victor frankel that touches on history, psychology, philosophy. it's another really important point, because the the opponents of the western canon, they, as you point out, they will write the whole thing off and say it's all just a bunch of dead white men. to which i would reply, you know, dead white men are in so bad they've actually done a lot of great things in the past, but they'll they'll just sort of write it all off. and as though they were a monolith. and when you engage with these works, you realize, one, they cut across all sorts of categories and the works

themselves will cut across all of these categories. how would you classify man's search for meaning? how would you classify plato's symposium? how would you classify dante's divine comedy? how would you classify the death of ivan eliot by leo tolstoy? is this fiction? is it novel? is it philosophy? is it theology? is it it's it's kind of a little bit of all of these things, including the scientific work by galileo is a dialog. it's a dialog between philosophers, and it touches on theological questions as well. and in our age, we have increasingly become specialized. the idea of the university barely exists anymore. a university is supposed to be one thing where all of these different disciplines come together in the single pursuit of truth. today, the university is a is a diversity. we've now we've now removed universality as as a core value of ours. now diverse. it is considered to be one of the highest values, and that the downside of that is that all of these different branches of

knowledge have very little to say to each other in the modern age. everyone is so specialized they know everything about one little topic, but they don't know anything about everything at all. and so when you when you read these books, one can recognize again, there is a coherence that science actually has something to say about philosophy and something to say about theology and something to say about poetry has something to say about has something to say about the theater and plato been able to communicate. is ideas better in a in a long essay? i'm sure he would have done that. there is something about the work of plato that that predisposes it for dialog. that wasn't true of his student aristotle. that is true of plato. and it's important to to remember that that there is coherence. it's that that we're not just picking up a bunch of random facts just to do it. we're not going to school to fill our head with a bunch of random trivia in case we happen to be on jeopardy someday. but we're trying to figure out something about the truth.

ultimate truth that will tell us about our communities and will tell us about things beyond our immediate perception and will tell us something about our souls and ourselves and what we're here to do. where you exposed to this canon at yale? a little bit. i don't want to yale too much. it's very, very mean thing to this one's alma mater. i think it was don kagan who was one of the great certainly not left wing philosophers. he was the great, great ancient greek historian who died only recently. and he had been the dean of yale college, i believe it was professor kagan, who said something to the effect of years ago, a student could graduate yale with an education, didn't have to have an education to graduate yale, but it was possible. and today, i'm not sure it's even possible because so much of that university and really all

of the universities has been taken over by grievance studies, the the pseudo academic departments that come out of critical theory. i'm thinking of women's sexual and gender studies, black studies is this studies that studies american studies, which ironically is the only studies where the teachers teach you to hate the thing that you are studying. that's not not true of black studies, not true of women's studies. there was a great exchange with another yale professor, harold bloom, a great defender of the western canon, who said that he had a student walk into his class and say, professor bloom, i just had an american studies class. and the professor spent 2 hours discussing how walt whitman was a racist and professor bloom said, walt whitman a racist in the face of that, my dear, i lose my capacity for rage and indignation. and i fear that that the way that these books, when they are taught today, are taught, is

that these are dead white men who were racist, who were sexist, who were ignorant, who didn't know anything. they were so much less sophisticated and brilliant than we modern people walking around and and to read literature from the perspective of that school of resentment is to waste your time. there is there are so many better things you could do with your time than to go. perusing through the pages of shakespeare or to figure out what a bigot he was, please go outside and touch grass. go. i don't know. go play soccer or something. you'll have a much better time with it if you're going to read books, you ought to do so in a spirit of humility, seeking wisdom. and you ought to do so because you love the books and you love the texts, and you love the truths that the books are trying to represent, and that that's the spirit that we're trying to instill in the book club. what about in high schools? are you finding that high schools are not teaching what we call the classics today?

no, certainly not. and they're censoring and editing some of these classics as well. the clearest case of this would be huckleberry finn over the last several decades. now you've seen moves to ban huck finn because it deals with the issue of slavery and you've seen calls to censor politically incorrect words out of the book. and this is so ironic when you get to huckleberry finn, because huckleberry finn is an indictment of slavery. huckleberry finn is an indictment of racism. but the philistines who are unfortunately leading our schools and our universities today, don't seem to understand that. i would be surprised if they ever crack the spine of the book themselves. they've just been told by somebody else that it's racist and therefore terrible, and we have to get rid of it. so unfortunately, now you're seeing all sorts of bizarre, frankly obscene in and pornographic books creeping into schools. one clear example of this would be gender queer by myakka bobby, which is essentially gay --, graphic vivid gay -- in schools, all the while the great writers

are being kicked out. there was a terrible move from the yale english department just, just a few years ago to remove the required ment that one study major english poets because the problem with those major english poets is they happen to be white guys because their their english i mean, the english tend to be white and so you think, my goodness, if one of the most prestigious english departments in the country is is getting rid of the requirement to study the great english poets, what's happening further down the line in the high schools and elsewhere. and so every time that we hear calls to open up the curricula, to bring in new and diverse writers, i have no problem with bringing in interesting writers of any sort of background or race or sex or whatever. but they have to be good books and the the books that are being kicked out in favor of these politically correct, fashionable texts are really, really good

books. and so if you think that you can beat shakespeare and and dante and all the way up to wallace stevens and modern people. okay, good luck with that. but if we're just doing this because of a cultural antipathy toward the past and toward man and toward white people and toward whatever other objective of loathing has come into your mind? well, that's going to be really, really deleterious to your education. now, michael knowles, you mentioned that the book club was created by prager. you you mentioned dennis prager. what is prager? you prager, you is an alternative as as our educational system has declined in recent decades. prager u. offers an alternative. it began with a series of five minute videos where you could tune in and you watch a complex subject or question distilled down into 5 minutes. there are hundreds and hundreds of these videos. they've gotten billions of views online.

and then prager you branched out. prager you has a number of other series as a number of influencers. you speak to young people on college campuses. has prager force which which goes out and spreads the message and then has my favorite my favorite show rather at prager u which is the book club. and so it's it's not a four year degree. it's amazing how sometimes prager u's opponents will say you're masquerading as a university. my answer to that is, oh, we would never do such a thing. we have far more respect for ourselves than to call ourselves a modern university. no. prager, u. is offering an educational alternative to people who feel that they have been ill served by their high schools and by by their colleges. and and now actually. prager, you like the daily wire, is offering children's content as well. we just believe that people deserve an alternative. one example outside of the book club for a video that we've done, a prager u is i've given a video on the history of

christopher columbus. this is a man without whom none of us would be here. this is the man who discovered the americas. he has been terribly maligned in the last 20 years by people who are utterly ignorant of the history of this man and his motivations and what really happened. and i'm reminded of of pope's warning that a little, little learnin is a dangerous thing. people who read one sentence about christopher columbus and and really don't know the whole story. so we present that that side and and because the popular culture is so opposed to tradition and the inherited wisdom of the ages, a lot of these videos are really simple, really common sense things that schoolchildren would have known 30, 40 years ago, but they are simply no longer taught. well, fortunately, it is available online and michael knowles is also an author to bestseller speechless, controlling words, controlling minds and then reasons to vote for democrats are a comprehensive guide. 266 pages. what was in that book?

well, you you started with my most recent book, speechless. that book contains words. my first number one national bestseller does not contain very many words at all. it's 266 blank pages and i'm really edified to say the blank book became a number one national amazon bestseller. i thought, man, if the second book doesn't sell, that's going to look really bad for me. they're going to tell me that i should stick to what i know, namely, nothing. but but the second book, thanks to many wonderful listeners out there, did hit the number one national bestseller last year. and ironically, the one called speechless is the one that has words in it. michael knowles is the host of the book club, the program and a podcast. we appreciate your time today on book tv. well, thank you so much for having me. a big fan of book tv. so it's an honor to be here. well, thanks for joining us for about books. a program and podcast produce by

c-span booktv. booktv will continue to bring you new author programs and publishing news each week. and a reminder that this podcast and all other c-span produce podcasts are available on our c-span and now app.

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