I was surprised to find out during a campus visits with my son that the '80s are now a big nostalgia craze for college students. To those of us who lived it, it's as weird as nostalgia for polio.

I'm no professor of pop culture, but I have a theory.

Historian Jacques Barzun, in "Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life," wrote: "The point at which good intentions exceeded the power to fulfill them marked for the culture the onset of decadence."

That's "Miami Vice" - a decadent world of stark white rooms in sunny paradise, shadowed by dark evil. Drugs and guns, guns and drugs - the plots are as interchangeable as sides of a Rubik's Cube, nearly always involving smugglers from Jamaica, Haiti, Africa, Cuba, Asia, Costa Rica, Mexico. It's a pink and aqua preview of our 21st century angst over the illegal immigration invasion.

While we're on the subject of Barzun, let's take a dip into the archives:

Bookshelf already full, you say? Pick up your broom, clear away the dust, and consider making that "Harry" disappear.

This is a staggering tribute to uber-critic Jacques Barzun's legendary intelligence and cantankerousness.

What truly impresses here is Barzun's breadth of knowledge; in an age of academic specialization, he is a rare, confident master-of-all-trades.

Read the Koran. Read it as Jacques Barzun suggests: with pencil in hand; underline and circle; with marginalia of surprise, sympathy, outrage, confusion. Annotate - make it your Koran - absorb and comprehend.

We can say that attempts to base a foreign policy on the idea of exporting democracy—as sought by both the Reagan and Clinton administrations — will forever be doomed to failure.

A book of enormous riches, it's sprinkled with provocations.