Missing History The Covert Education of a Child of the Great Books

The author, who grew up as a faculty child on the campus of St. John's College, the school best known for offering a Great Books curriculum (those deemed by the sages of the ages to be the seminal works of western culture), here looks back on an upbringing steeped in its assumptions. In the tradition of educational chronicles that runs the gamut from St. Augustine's Confessions to Alice Kaplan's French Lessons, Missing History is a kind of revisionist intellectual autobiography. Instead of tracing her progress from a state of sin to a state of grace, the author revisits her school years to figure out how she was indoctrinated into thinking that she should embark upon this classic journey. An idiosyncratic and affectionate book, Missing History is part educational memoir, part meditation upon how our assumptions as to what it means to know form and deform our experience.