Early Years
MacDonald is of German and Scottish ancestry. He was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin and raised in a traditional Roman Catholic family. His father was a policeman and his mother was a secretary. He went to parochial schools and played basketball in high school. He entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison and became an activist in the anti-war movement from about 1965 to 1975. During this period, he perceived the East Coast Jewish origins of the majority of the movement there (Culture of Critique, p. 104), which motivated his interest in Jewish intellectual movements.
MacDonald became a philosophy major and abandoned leftist radicalism. He embarked on a career as a jazz pianist, but by the late 1970s had abandoned it in favour of academia. While in graduate school, he became attracted to E. O. Wilson's theory of sociobiology.
Read more about this topic: Kevin B. MacDonald
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“If you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandma’s early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if you’ve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)
“... it is use, and use alone, which leads one of us, tolerably trained to recognize any criterion of grace or any sense of the fitness of things, to tolerate ... the styles of dress to which we are more or less conforming every day of our lives. Fifty years hence they will seem to us as uncultivated as the nose-rings of the Hottentot seem today.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)