Mike:
For the merits or otherwise of Jacques Barzun’s work I refer readers to my forthcoming essay “Rosicrucian Themes in Twentieth-Century American Historiography” in the Fall issue of Phenomenological Hermeneutics Quarterly.
I just want to point out that Micky Dolenz’s reading list also includes E.O. Wilson’s On Human Nature, a book so deeply, iredeemably politically incorrect that I quoted at length from it in We Are Doomed (p. 145).
I also told everyone’s favorite Wilson story. It bears re-telling:
Wilson featured in one of the more colorful incidents in the nature-nurture war. At an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium in 1978, he had a pitcher of ice water dumped on his head by Culturists chanting, “Racist Wilson you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!”
Wilson is, in short, a good egg, and I congratulate the former Monkee for his intelligent perspicacity.
The Monkees’ music, though, was low-grade pap.