When I was a boy about 11, I committed a crime that changed my life.
I stole a book. I was a book thief.
I found it in another kid’s desk and began reading, hiding it behind some boring textbook, and couldn’t give it up.
And when the last bell rang, I hid it furtively under my jacket as if it were some rare, precious and struggling bird, and walked home.
It’s still with me. I’ll never give it up.
That book that opened up the world to me.
“Odysseus the Wanderer,” written for children by the classicist Aubrey de Selincourt.
It is a version of the “Odyssey” of Homer, the greatest adventure story ever told. I’ve since read several translations of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey.”
The crafty Odysseus, the man of wrath, was an expert trickster. He duped the Trojans with his Trojan horse, befuddled the man-eating Cyclops and withstood the deadly song of the sirens.
Though he was clearly pre-Christian, I considered the wandering King of Ithaca as a patron saint. There was no trap he couldn’t escape with his wits. His story has shaped Western literature — as well as “Star Trek” — for some 3,000 years.
But there is one thing Odysseus may not be able to withstand:
The political left and the growing #disrupttexts movement — fueled by critical race theory — in American public schools wants him gone.
Classic Western literature, from Homer to Shakespeare, Mark Twain and even Harper Lee, is now being canceled, much in the same way that the Islamic State group and early Christians destroyed ancient statues that offended them.