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January 14, 2021 at 6:55 pm

Insider Higher Ed Reviews Brian Collins’ Square Peg Podcast Series

Dr. Brian Collins holds a horror film poster from India.

Dr. Brian Collins holds a horror film poster from India.

Inside Higher Ed’s Scott McLemee writes about Dr. Brian Collins’ podcast series A Very Square Peg: The Strange and Remarkable Life of the Polymath Robert Eisler in a column called Podcasting a Polymath.

…Before expressing enthusiasm, let me admit to a brief period of suspicion.

Robert Eisler’s life sounds like something Thomas Pynchon and Roberto Bolaño might have brainstormed for a shared character in their fiction. A cursory list of elements found in his biography and bibliography would necessarily include book theft, ancient cosmology, Nazi concentrations camps, economics, classical literature, art history, speculations on biblical history, and sadomasochism. (He may also have been an influence on I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the title character of which was played by the young Michael Landon.) Collins mentions in the first episode that no book-length study of Eisler exists, while the entry on him in Wikipedia was created only in late 2018 — which would not have been long before production on A Very Square Peg presumably got underway….

Read McLemee’s column at Inside Higher Ed.

Listen to Collins’ podcasts.

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