Blue Collar Intellectuals, my fourth book, becomes available in less than two weeks. I'm told that around the country people are already camping in front of stores. These spontaneous storefront tributes are appreciated, but you need not trouble yourself, particularly in the inclement weather. From the comfort of your own home, you can order Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America (do it here now!) over the world wide web. If you like my website, you will love my book. And with the holidays approaching, perhaps a blue collar intellectual on your Christmas list will appreciate the book as a gift. It's as much a compliment to the recipient as it is a present. Don't take my word for it. See what these esteemed smarticians have to say about Blue Collar Intellectuals....

"This book is not only an exciting story; it also corrects a terrible cultural mistake--the mistake of treating high culture, Great Books, and other canon-making visions of tradition as exploitative and spurious. Previous generations of intellectuals believed that our great cultural inheritance belonged to everyone, rich and poor, black and white and brown. Daniel Flynn's profiles revive that belief, and they mark a vital alternative to the complacent relativism of contemporary cultural stewards."
--Mark Bauerlein, best-selling author of The Dumbest Generation

"Flynn's case histories of a wonderful--and uniquely American--tradition of bringing learning to the masses offers us a morality tale in these times of spiraling tuition, esoteric publication, and an insular academia mostly cut off from wider society. The fascinating portraits here remind us how not so long ago an interest in making knowledge known beyond the campus was not antithetical to learning but the very essence of the true intellectual."
--Victor Davis Hanson, coauthor of Who Killed Homer? and The Bonfire of the Humanities

"Back in the middle decades of the twentieth century, millions of Americans supped at the table of high culture, learning history, philosophy, and economics from intellectual entrepreneurs like Will and Ariel Durant, Mortimer Adler, and Eric Hoffer. Daniel Flynn tells their story in Blue Collar Intellectuals--and tells us why we miss them today."
--Michael Barone, senior political analyst at the Washington Examiner, coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics

"Blue Collar Intellectuals powerfully evokes the lost era when the 'everyman' aspired to higher things and the defenders of high culture spoke and wrote in clear, accessible language. Flynn's deft historical profiles remind us that popular culture and the life of the mind need not be adversaries."
--Brian C. Anderson, editor of City Journal and author of South Park Conservatives

Impressive testimonials.

I am a huge VDH fan.

Hoping Santa will bring me two books this Christmas: BCI and Steyn's new one.

I am presently enrolled as a student in the Graduate Institute at St. John's College Annapolis, a great books program after Mortimer Adler's own heart. Or at least, it was so originally. The faculty is now dominated by the worst sort of cloak-and-dagger Straussians, and it is sad how much things have changed.

Congrats on enrollment in the St. John's program, Ben. There is a whole chapter on Adler in my book. Adler, you may know, was an annual speaker at St. John's for decades. A great tradition among the students involved playing gags during Adler's talks (alarm clocks erupting in unison, marble avalanches, gorrilla suits, etc.). I didn't write about the differences between Adler and Strauss in "Blue Collar Intellectuals." It may be easy for outsiders looking in to imagine them as two peas in a pod, given their associations with the University of Chicago and the Great Books. But their aims were very different, with Adler seeking to bring the Great Books to the everyman and Strauss envisioning them as aimed at elite philosophers. Perhaps I will write about them in a piece, as I have written about them separately already.