The author, who grew up as a faculty child on the campus of St. John's College, the school best known for offering a Great Books curriculum (those deemed by the sages of the ages to be the seminal works of western culture), here looks back on an upbringing steeped in its assumptions. In the tradition of educational chronicles that runs the gamut from St. Augustine's Confessions to Alice Kaplan's French Lessons, Missing History is a kind of revisionist...