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By the author of the Boston Globe #1 bestseller Gracefully Insane: A wry, witty history of an unlikely literary fad, and of American pop culture in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Before the dawn of the television age, in an ambitious effort to enlighten the masses via door-to-door sales, Encyclopedia Britannica and the University of Chicago launched the Great Books of Western Civilization, "all fifty-four volumes of them... purporting to encompass all of Western knowledge from Homer to Freud." Led by the "intellectual Mutt 'n' Jeff act" of former University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins and his sidekick Mortimer Adler, the Great Books briefly, and improbably, caught the nation's imagination. In his discussion, Boston Globe columnist Beam looks at how and why this multi-year project took shape, what it managed to accomplish (or not), and the lasting effects it had on college curricula (in the familiar form of Dead White Males). Beam (Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital) describes meetings endured by the selection committee, and countless debates over Euripedes, Herodotus, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens and Whitman ("When it comes to Great Books, no one is without an opinion."), but tells it like it is regarding the Syntopicon they devised-at "3,000 subtopics and 163,000 separate entries, not exactly a user-friendly compendium"-and the resulting volumes, labeling them "icons of unreadability-32,000 pages of tiny, double-column, eye-straining type." By lauding the intent and intelligently critiquing the outcome, Beam offers an insightful, accessible and fair narrative on the Great Books, its time, and its surprisingly significant legacy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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John Stapleton
reviewed A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books on January 06, 2009
A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books
Having been a student of the "Great Books" for more than twenty years I came to this book with a certain bias in favor of them. I found that Alex Beam has written an interesting exploration of some aspects of the Great Books phenomenon in American culture. I say some aspects because, while I do not disagree with many of his observations, I came away from the book with a feeling that he never developed a fundamental understanding of the importance of the Great Books. Whether the canon should be limited or not is not the most important question, rather the question is what value there is in recognizing, reading and developing an understanding, however limited, of the works of the greatest minds of the world. Reading and studying and discussing the Great Books and the ideas encompassed in them provides an education that cannot be obtained any other way. Most importantly it provides a base for continuing to grow and flourish as a human being. The author spends much of the book discussing attempts, some misguided and some not, to encourage and spread the reading of Great Books. Whether any of these attempts succeeded depended not so much on the value of the books themselves, which I believe cannot be doubted, but on the methods used by the purveyors of the Great Book experience. I can only look back on and continue my own experience which I have found invaluable in my own life. The Great Books are very much alive for me and many others. While the author discusses finding himself "occasionally succumbing to creeping great-bookism", I would suggest that thoughtful human beings would be better off by incorporating the lessons of the Great Books into to their lives.
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