It’s been a couple weeks since I finished Michael Bérubé’s new book, What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? I didn’t find anything in the last hundred pages or so to make me change my mind about the praise I bestowed in my premature, sidelong review. It’s a very good book, and you should read it.
But I was looking through the recent Scientific American today, and found a disturbing study that indicated literacy in the US may be much lower, for all practical purposes, than any of us had imagined. When researchers tallied not only the people who were profoundly illiterate — able to read stop signs and such, but not much else — with people who were what you might call socially illiterate — able to extract the information they need from, say, an owners’ manual, but incapable of acquiring and retaining moderately complex concepts in written material — it turns out that as many as a third of Americans can be considered illiterate.
Of course, my first thought in reading this disturbing news was concern for Michael’s book. It’s a complex book, what with its references to literature and politics and academia and such, and likely to be intimidating at first glance to conservative readers or to others who are at all insecure about their literacy.
This cannot, obviously, be allowed to stand. Something must be done, I thought, to promote Michael’s wonderful book to a new audience.
And so, in the spirit of bridge-building, I present to you What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? The Graphic Novel. (4MB PDF.)
(Updated again: I’ve moved the file. The internet just ate twice my monthly allotted bandwidth in six hours. Let Apple take the hit.)
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Categories:
Recommended
Satire
Writing
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