Late Night Reading follows the books I read "late at night" since it's really the only time I have a chance to sit down and read! It will be referred to as "LNR" in future postings.

I borrowed this book from one of my friends and had a hard-time putting it down. The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition is written by E. Christian Kopff, a classicist at the University of Colorado. Kopff provides great thought-provoking chapters and strong arguments for bringing back the "classics" to help our children's education.

Here's an excerpt from Booklist...

"Contemporary Chronicles" contains profiles in classical courage drawn from academe and the movies; especially noteworthy are the sketch of classicist and Scottish nationalist Douglas Young and the considerations of The Godfather, the films of Clint Eastwood, and The Lion King as enactments of classical Greek ethical concepts. Kopff concludes with practical proposals for restoring Latin and Greek to elementary and secondary curricula and with guidance for adults who want to learn them. His clean and lively style throughout constitutes a very cogent arguing point for teaching the classical languages again: would that we all wrote this well.

I also enjoyed the story in the introduction explaining the title of the book.

The Devil Knows Latin at Amazon.com

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