What book should colleges require their incoming freshmen to read? If the goal were combatting young Americans’ historical ignorance, the book to replace current frontrunners by race hustlers Ibram Kendi, Robin di Angelo, and Michelle Alexander would have to be Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.
But let’s say you enjoyed blowing up ant colonies and gopher holes as a child and now aspire to something more dramatic. In that case, your choice would have to be Flashman (Herbert Jenkins, 1969) by the Scotsman George MacDonald Fraser. The resulting explosions of censorious young crania would be visible from outer space. Today’s college students, especially the neurasthenic females, might never recover from Fraser’s exuberant shredding of progressive taboos. The sane world would offer thanks.
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of The War on Cops.
This piece originally appeared in Claremont Review of Books