it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on ancient and modern writers reconsidered. It begins:
No one, at least no one who wanted to be taken seriously by serious people, ever talked about how much money they had, and no one running for public office would have thought to brag that money made him more qualified than anyone who was not rich. And now, suddenly, money, and vast amounts of it, seem to have become almost the only qualification anyone needs to have. The question is whether this almost slavish devotion to wealth, this idea that money proves ability, is a new phenomenon, or something that was there from the beginning, implicit in the very principles on which the modern world was created. It is not a new question. It is the question Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan and John Locke in The Second Treatise on Government tried to examine: whether it was time to make a final break with what Plato inVisit D.W. Buffa's website.The Republic and Aristotle in The Politics had insisted were the ways in which human beings should live.
The question that Hobbes and Locke thought Plato and Aristotle had failed to answer adequately, is not a question that gets asked very often anymore. We know, or think we know, how we should live. We know, or think we know, what we want and what we need to do to get it. We know that nothing is more important than economics and that money is the only real measure of success. Instead of educating citizens, men and women who know how to rule themselves, our universities are judged by how many of their graduates are able to compete in the world market. The liberal arts have been replaced in importance by the schools of business, philosophy and history by accounting and computer science, and scarcely anyone thinks this a loss. Freedom, we are told, is the most important thing, and freedom can only exist where there are...[read on]
Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered.
--Marshal Zeringue