Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2003) ("Undergraduate students admitted to Harvard were generally very bright in the sense that they were quick learners. Their knowledge, however, was appallingly slight. When in 1985 I offered my first freshman seminar on Russian intellectual history, I had 127 applicants for 12 places, and so I administered quick personal tests. I did not expect that the students would know anything about Russia, but I did think that a someone interested in intellectual history would be familiar with the classics of world literature. I was sadly disappointed: apart from Crime and Punishment which, I believe, they read as a thriller and Madame Bovary (for those who studied advanced high school French), they knew nothing: Dickens, Tolstoy, George Eliot, Chekhov, Cervantes were to them names, if that. I was dismayed how culturally deracine America's young were, how they lacked any cultural background to fall back on when they faced life's inevitable problems. The situation was so bad that when a prospective student revealed familiarity with any major writer or thinker of the past, I admitted him or her on the spot." Id. at 93-94.).
Lyndal Roper, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (New York: Random House, 2017) ("Luther is a difficult hero. nonetheless. His writings can be full of hatred, and his predilection for scatological rhetoric and humor is not to modern taste. He could be authoritarian, bullying, overconfident; his domineering ways overshadowed his children's lives and alienated many of his followers. His intransigent capacity to demonize his opponents was more than a psychological flaw because it meant that Protestantism spit very early, weakening it permanently and leading to centuries of war. His anti-Semitism was more visceral than that of may of his contemporaries, and it was also intrinsic to his religiosity and his understating of the relation between the Old and the New Testament. It cannot just be excused as the prejudice of his day. His greatest intellectual gift was his ability to simplify, to cut to the heart of an issue--but this also made it difficult for him to compromise or see nuance. And yet only someone with an utter inability to see anyone else's point of view could have had the courage to take on the papacy to, to act like a 'blinkered horse' looking neither right nor left, but treading relentlessly onward regardless of the consequences. And only someone with a sense of humor, a stubborn realism, and a remarkable ability to engage the deepest loyalties of others could have avoided the martyrdom that threatened." Id at 410-411. Quite an interesting biography!).
