Bonfire of the Humanities

Bruce S. Thornton grew up on a cattle ranch in Fresno, California. His father was a cowboy and a barber who never attended high school, his mother the child of Italian immigrants. From an early age, Thornton worked on the ranch, and from the experience he acquired a practical realism, a clear-eyed acceptance of the concrete, harsh realities sometimes overlooked or ignored in the ivory-tower academy. He received his B.A. in Latin and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA and is currently professor of Classics and Humanities in the Department of Foreign Languages at California State University in Fresno. Thornton is the author of Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization, and Plagues of the Mind.
Victor Davis Hanson is a professor of Greek and Director of the Classics Program at California State University, Fresno. He is the author or editor of nine books, including The Other Greeks (Free Press, 1995), Fields Without Dreams: Defending the Agrarian Ideal (Free Press, 1996), Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (with John Heath, Free Press, 1998), and The Soul of Battle (Free Press, 1999). In 1992 he was named the most outstanding undergraduate teacher of classics in the nation.
John Heath is associate professor of classics at Santa Clara University. His books include Actaeon, the Unmannerly Intruder (Peter Lang, 1992) and Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (with Victor Davis Hanson, Free Press, 1998).