Memoirs of a Happy Failure

Memoirs of a Happy Failure by Alice von Hildebrand with John Henry Crosby, 184 pages

As a teenager, Alice Jourdain and her sister fled Belgium for America, just ahead of the German invasion.  The experience helped to convince her of the reality of evil and the necessity of an uncompromising defense of objective truth.  While working as a shelver at a library, she discovered the works of her future husband, Dietrich von Hildebrand, a brilliant philosopher who had fled Germany after the Nazi takeover and Austria after the Anschluss and was now teaching in New York.  She began teaching at Hunter College, and remained there for decades, confronting entrenched ignorance, malicious persecution, and a succession of intellectual fashions, joyfully fighting the long defeat.

At its heart, Dame von Hildebrand's memoir, like her life, is a testament to the idea that education does not - can not - have any purpose without the foundation of a belief in objective truth.