A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam

by Alex Beam

Today the classics of the western canon, written by the proverbial ''dead white men,'' are cannon fodder in the culture wars. But in the 1950s and 1960s, they were a pop culture phenomenon. The Great Books of Western Civilization, fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion? In A Great Idea at the Time Alex Beam explores the Great Books mania, in an entertaining and strangely poignant portrait of American popular culture on the threshold of the television age. Populated with memorable characters, A Great Idea at the Time will leave readers asking Have I read Lucretius's De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not?

Genres: Books About Books, Nonfiction, History, Education, Literature, Classics, American History

Hardcover

First published November 3, 2008

About the author

I'm [still] a [part-time] columnist for the Boston Globe. Before that I worked as a business reporter in Los Angeles and Moscow. I've lived in Boston since 1984, and written for the newspaper since 1987. I'm working on my next book, about the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. I wish I still resembled that handsome photo, taken about a decade ago. UPDATE: Finished the Joseph Smith book (obviously) and have started turning over soil for my next project. UPDATE: Finished that project, a short, sharp book called "The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship." UPDATE The Nabokov-Wilson book got lovely reviews, and now I am days away from handing in the ms for my seventh book, my fifth work of nonfiction, the (true) story of Mies van der Rohe and his girlfriend/client/tormentor, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, for whom he built the Farnsworth House. (Please Google it - famous, beautiful house) ) UPDATE I ghost-wrote a book sometime in here, but alas under conditions of strictest secrecy. It was quite successful and I'd be happpy to do that kind of work again. I follow my Goodreads reviews, and would like to offer a collective Thank You to the men and women, who -- without exception, as far as I can see -- have offered literate, unbiased reactions to my writing. Thanks!

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

THE RISE AND FALL OF A COMPLETELY WRONG-HEADED IDEA

54 fake leather volumes, which included 443 different works by 74 white male very dead authors, everything important from Homer to Freud, all human knowledge worth having, all great thoughts worth thinking, yours for ten bucks down and ten bucks weekly payments, we’ll throw in a bookcase, come on sir, educate your family - with these Great Books behind them there’s nothing your kids can’t do, no toffeenosed patrician can patronise your boy when he can fire off a quote from Aeschylus’ "The Suppliant Maidens" or Aristotle’s "Posterior Analytics."

Well, it was 1952. The three mildly eccentric academics who came up with this master plan had some dreamy notions that all Americans, be they ever so humble, could find joy and enlightenment in these Great Books, that after a day in the tuna cannery a guy would repair to his den and pluck from out of the attractively displayed set something like Fourier’s "Analytical Theory of Heat" whilst sipping a Bud.

WAIT, SCIENCE? NOT JUST LITERATURE?

Yes, scientific treatises which were gigantic forward strides in the 17th and 18th centuries were dished up as Great Books. Literature is not progressive, but science is. So ancient technical science books become obsolete. This is obvious, but was not to the Great Books editors. The American Association for the Advancement of Science commented :

Few thinking persons are likely to linger long over tables giving for the 1840s monthly magnetic declinations at Toronto, St Petersburg, Washington, Lake Athabasca and Fort Simpson.

EVEN WORSE

The Great Books were presented in 32,000 pages of tiny 9-point type in double columns and with NO introductions and NO footnotes and NO context at all. Well, if it’s such a Great Book, maybe all that is just fluff, and Aristophanes and Apollonius of Perga will just speak directly to your heart.

BUT THE SILLIEST PART IS YET TO COME

Inside the Great Books the editors decided were Great Ideas. Wouldn’t it be extra great to be able to follow a Great Idea – like, say, Democracy or Logic or Truth – all the way from what Plato said about it down to what Freud said about it? So they assembled a two-volume index. It turned out that there were precisely 102 Great Ideas. And they hired 120 recent graduates to read through the 443 mighty works looking for references to the 102 Great Ideas. Compiling this index nearly bankrupted the whole project before it got started. But after two years and around one million dollars it was done. They called it THE SYNTOPICON and it was 2428 pages long.

Advert :

A Problem? Consult this evening with the greatest minds of the Western world – grasp their precious wisdom…The ability to Discuss and Clarify Basic Ideas is vital to success. Doors open to the man who possesses this talent.

DID PEOPLE ACTUALLY FALL FOR THIS RIDICULOUS IDEA?

Well, kind of. Alex Beam says

Against all odds, the Great Books joined the roster of postwar fads like drive-ins, hula hoops and Mexican jumping beans.

Many libraries and colleges were kind of browbeaten into thinking they should invest in a set but sales to ordinary Americans were disappointing to begin with, until a new breed of tough door to door salesmen were recruited, and then – boom! At the peak, in 1961, they sold $22 million of these absurd sets. When people started to challenge the idea of a canon of exclusively DWMs, Adler, one of the three editors, said "there are no 'Great Books' by black writers before the 1955 cut-off” and “I think probably in the next century there will be some Black that writes a Great Book, but there hasn’t been any so far”.

Eventually the whole Great Books idea picked up more and more killing associations :

Soon enough the Great Books were synonymous with boosterism, Babbitry….they were everything that was wrong, unchic and middlebrow about Middle America.

(Which is a paradox, since the whole 54 volumes is unceasingly and ferociously highbrow from start to finish.)

It was a late 50s to late 60s phenomenon, then dwindled into a ghostly afterlife of discussion groups attended by elderly adherents which apparently survive to this day.

WHAT IS A GREAT BOOK ANYWAY?

Is it a book wherein you may read the author’s answer to the following question :

Whether we should Distinguish Irascible and Concupiscible Parts in the Superior Appetite?

I would hazard that the answer is no. The above is from Thomas Aquinas.

[John-Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

You don't have to like a subject to write about it. Heck, there are plenty of subjects that are deserving of ridicule and condemnation. And the "Great Books" movement (I almost put scare-quotes around "movement") has some serious flaws. But this book just exposes the author as narrow-minded while leaving you wishing he did a lot more research into his subject.

What has Alex Beam done? He learned a bit about the origins of "Great Books" courses like Columbia's Literature-Humanities sequence and the St. John's College curriculum. He even sat in on a few St. John's classes and spoke to a few people involved.

He gives us a sense of the personalities of the people involved, particularly Mortimer Adler. He tells a story, though it's not much of a story. (There were these guys, and they were really into books, and they thought people should read them. They had some influence at a few colleges and they launched some publishing ventures and book clubs and stuff.) Beam's principal bugaboos are: (1) it's ridiculous to learn science from the original scientific works -- why read Euclid or Newton when you can read a textbook?; (2) translations matter; and (3) a lot of great books aren't that great, and it's hard to know what makes a book great, but he's glad that he's been turned onto writers like Epictetus.

That's about it. This book should have been half as long or four times as long. And it should have been written by someone else. Someone who knows a lot about higher education, particularly literature and philosophy. Or by someone who doesn't care much about that stuff but who knows a lot about 20th century America. Or by someone with a really good sense of humor. Or by someone with no sense of humor at all BUT who is self-aware on that matter.

I teach literature and philosophy and I'll be the first to say that such an education isn't for everyone. Reading good books doesn't solve social problems and it doesn't make you a better person. (It can help, but it can hurt as well.) It helps to know about historical and cultural context when you read a book, but if a book is any good, it can't be reduced to the particulars of its time and place and even its author. Because yes, it's possible for a book to be good, even if you don't like it.

What Mr. Beam shows and doesn't quite say is that Great Books people tend to be enthusiasts. They are amateurs in the old-fashioned sense. They love things and they want other people to love them, too. This means that it's easy to laugh at them or say they're wasting their (and everyone else's) time. Mr. Beam writes as if he doesn't love anything, or rather, as if whatever he loves doesn't mean anything to anyone other than himself. So you can skip this one. If you're interested in the ways that reading books might be a waste of time that ruins people's lives, Cervantes wrote a really good book on that subject.

[James Henderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

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.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

After all, I wrote the book. I visited this site for the first time and just wanted to say, Thank You to the many thoughtful commenters. It's hard not to see the occasional vituperative attack, but I feel I wrote this book in good faith. And yes, it's more about the commercial/cultural movement than the books themselves. I had never heard of the GBs, honestly, so these were 3-4 wonderful years of my life. Perhaps I was a little hard on Adler (tho not half as hard as Joseph Epstein, who knew A. quite well; and come to think of it, not as hard on him as his own son, or his colleagues .. oh, never mind) but take heart -- a university press will soon be publishing a more respectful treatment of A's life and works.

[Christopher Rush · Rating 1 out of 5]

The following review is not meant to be a libelous assault on Mr. Beam, the PublicAffairs publishing people, or people in Mr. Beam's family; simply it is an honest appraisal of his work, doing to him what he felt compelled to do to people in his book. Before the reader gets half-way through page 2 of A Great Idea at the Time, the reader has grasped one key point: the narrator of the book is a bit of a jerk. Beam takes advantage of every opportunity (even when not pertinent) to malign and defame Mortimer Adler, the Great Books of the Western World project, and classical education. Admittedly, Beam is rather generous to Robert Hutchins, most likely because most of the sources he used to compile this diatribe have few unkind things to say about him. Adler is Beam's whipping boy and the brunt of most of his vitriol. Beam shows off his ignorance of many things throughout his overly familiar work: for example, he responds to a newspaper article about Mrs. Roosevelt spending a night in the White House as if it is some inscrutable inside joke - I don't claim to know everything about WW2, but I have heard enough Jack Benny and Fibber McGee and Molly shows to know what a rarity it was for the world-travelling Mrs. Roosevelt to actually stay in the White House. He also uses "bemused" to mean "amused," not "confused," but since he probably had a public school education, his ignorance is explainable. The fact Beam places himself in the Dewey camp in the John Dewey vs. Adler/Hutchins/GBWW debate helps further eradicate any credibility he has in education. In the first few chapters of the book dealing with the education shifts at the U. of Chicago, as Hutchins and Adler and Co. brought back actual classical methods of discussion and intellectual rigor, Beam actually cites people against them as if "bringing back medieval education" was somehow a bad thing! As our current public educational status should make the situation perfectly lucid, the classical/medieval methods of education were the ways people actually learned! The post-Mann/Dewey education system we have today (with its pragmatic emphases) is not working. Beam doesn't even seem to recognize this when he references and quotes from people who experienced Hutchins/Adler/Van Doren's classical pedagogy, since they are key influential thinkers and successful people, most of whom recognize (if not then at least now) the kind of intellectual demand they had in those courses actually helped fit them for life, not just vocational training or "letting the kids do what makes them happy and call it education" under Dewey.

The GBWW are also lambasted throughout the work, though he does intimate what happened with them was not what Hutchins and Adler really envisioned in the first place. What they were trying to do, in an era before the paperback/publishing/e-book inundation we take for granted today, was get a large selection of the influential, foundational, important works of Western Civilization into the hands of the public. Why is that such a bad thing? Attacking it as racist and sexist is so nonsensical it needs not be addressed. Complaining about the font size, and then bragging about how his own font size is slightly larger, was embarrassing to read. I'm pretty sure they were trying to make them accessible. Had they made the print larger and thus made the books bigger and more expensive, Beam would have complained about that instead. Beam makes the point it was William Benton's idea to make money from the GBWW to save the Encyclopedia Britannica, but then he blames all the huckster travelling salesmen techniques the EB salesforce used to get money back for the EB people on Adler and Hutchins and the GBWW! Adler and Hutchins weren't interested in profit; they were interested in helping Americans think accurately and embrace the idea of Western Civilization.

Beam's lampooning of the Syntopicon and the Great Ideas is painful - not in its accuracy but in its unmitigated petulance and irrelevancy. Adler's purpose in the Syntopic was to try to make the great ideas more accessible - the series' "inaccessibility" is another thing Beam complains of throughout! He complains of the lack of explanatory footnotes and commentaries - how dare Hutchins and Adler treat the American reading public like intelligent people who can follow arguments through concentration alone! Surely if Hutchins and Adler included commentaries and footnotes, Beam would have reprimanded them foisting their own interpretations on the unsuspecting public (even if Hutchins had done all the footnotes himself, Beam would have found some way to blame it on Adler).

Beam says the selection committee voted on the works to be included, yet he then claims no one knows how the "science" selections made it in. How can that be? Citing contemporary teachers (contemporaneous both of the printing of the series and today) of science and math (and philosophy) who claim they can't understand Copernicus, or Apollonius of Perga, or Ptolemy (and Kant), it was ridiculous for Adler/Hutchins to include them. What that actually tells us, Mr. Beam, is that the educators of the 20th century who abandoned classical/medieval educational pedagogies and inquiries are not as good at what they do! It does not tell us that the classic works are inferior; it tells us we are inferior.

The last few chapters address the "aftereffects" of the Hutchins/Adler experiments; unsurprisingly by this point, Beams takes none of them seriously. He has some difficulty sloughing off Columbia's CC and LitHum courses, especially in the afterglow of David Denby's somewhat backhanded appraisal of them. Even so, he does manage to downplay the importance of classical studies, inexplicably referencing Queer Theorists who don't approve of Western Civilization. His appraisal of St. John's College is likewise perplexing, highlighting the school's croquet team and the student body's drinking habits, as if only students who study Western Civilization get drunk. He tries to make the point the students who graduate from St. John's and have difficulty getting used to the pragmatic "teaching to the test" version of "education" in other schools (especially post-graduate programs) is somehow a knock against Socratic teaching methods. He fails. Instead, he indirectly highlights the failure of pragmatic educational methods. Perhaps why American students are not competing with non-American students isn't that they aren't good at math and science (and so should have their band and orchestra programs revoked), but rather it's because American schools have rejected actually teaching students not only how to think but also how to live rightly.

Beam spends some final moments discussing how he sat in on a couple of Great Book Discussion Groups while researching the book. Here is another area in which Beam's ambivalence shines through in Shadwell-like dullness. He admits he was challenged by the kind of discussion and reading he did (as if somehow, despite his prejudices, the "Great Books" were actually great after all!), and that he enjoyed the process. Yet, because he had bad discussers in his groups, too, and some people had opinions of the reading selections different from his own, the process is only for old people and will die off none too soon. Just when the reader thinks he can't possibly say anything more ludicrous than what he has already said, he makes the assertion "this is what it must be like for St. John's students every day" (or words to that effect). Certainly, Mr. Beam. How could your experience with a group of over-50-year-olds who had 6 months to read 3 works and formalize their responses based on a lifetime's worth of experiences possibly be different from the daily experience of teenagers in college reading great books with like-minded individuals going through similar daily experiences on one campus? Even though he had a small glimpse of the Great Books actually being great, Beam can't let himself accept the notion of the Great Books because that would mean at least tacitly agreeing with Mortimer Adler, which is unacceptable to him.

Beam gives the reader the impression he went into the project with the supposition the Great Books of the Western World was a laughable pile of nonsense, and despite his interviews and experiences with people who embraced all the benefits they gained from reading the books, experiencing genuine education under Hutchins and Adler, and even the positive things they had to say about Mortimer Adler himself, Beam wants us to ignore it all and believe with him it was all a ridiculous waste of time. I should have realized (despite the disingenuously kind words on the dust jacket) the picture of the '50s family on the cover was meant as an irony, along with everything else. His annotated survey of the Great Books at the end of his work only furthers our understanding of how little he understood what Hutchins and Adler were trying to do and what education truly is. If anyone is in doubt about what was lost in American society and education by abandoning Adler, Hutchins, Great Books, and classical education, one should read this book. Alex Beam makes a great case for why Horace Mann and John Dewey helped ruin America, even though he was trying to do the opposite.

[Peg - The History Shelf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Check out my review on my BookTube channel, The History Shelf: https://youtu.be/DmMpBFqD6lI

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a light, frothy, humorous account of the Great Books program, with its founders, University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins and his friend and fellow academic Mortimer Adler, cast respectively as the tall, charismatic, Waspy golden boy ("[he] made homosexuals of us all," said an admiring colleague), and the short, gnomelike, Semitic, annoying sidekick. Adler was "a troll next to the godlike Hutchins," Alex Beam informs us.

By "great books" Beam means several things. The main subject of the book is the Great Books of the Western World, the 54-volume set put out by Encyclopedia Britannica under the auspices of the University of Chicago and sold door-to-door and via advertisements, aimed at middlebrow, aspirational households. The "great books" idea - but not the Britannica texts themselves - was the basis for several college curricula, including Columbia's, begun by John Erksine, the Core at the University of Chicago, and the entire curriculum of St. John's College of Annapolis (and New Mexico). It lives on, just barely apparently, in the book discussion groups of the Great Books Foundation.

The funniest details are the meeting minutes of the 1943 selection committee. Mark Van Doren insists: "Molière will go out only over my bruised body. He is the perfect comedian, the classic comedian, and also he is universally delightful; he will be read by cooks and Congressmen with equal pleasure." They debated whether to include the Icelandic saga Burnt Njal; "Mr. Hutchins went on the record as not liking sagas." He also was not fond of science. "I must repel the suggestion that I have at any time said I would read Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Kepler." David Hume, to Hutchins, was "an ass."

When the ad campaigns went national, some odd sales pitches were employed. "Thousands now turning to Great Books as increased life expectancy provides more time for mental recreation." If that didn't persuade you, the tomes were "A Prime Source of Self-Improvement and an inexhaustible fund of adult entertainment." A million sets were sold, but Hutchins and Adler both died feeling they had been failures, and Beam doesn't seem inclined to disagree.

[Mitchell Friedman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not a particularly good book. But an interesting one. I've not read the Great Books. I had a copy at one point. Well to be fair it was my dad's copy, but he made it clear that it was mine. So I borrowed a couple of books when I was taking philosophy in college, specifically Kant and Hobbes and I don't think I got more than 10 pages into either one of them. I never did take his set. Initially I didn't have room for them. And then we found sets of Classics Club and Harvard Classics at used book stores. And then a partial set of the Great Books for like $20. My dad actually read on his set for at least 10 years, probably on and off for more like 20. But I don't remember him ever mentioning or me ever tripping over the idea that at one point the Great Books was a craze way back when. This book does a pretty good job of telling the story of the Great Books as eventually published by Encyclopedia Britannica. But the author seemed to think a lot of himself. And the use of unnecessary unusual words was just annoying. There is much I had kind of picked up on my own - like that the works of math and science were unreadable. And that reading the classics without annotations is hard. As a review of the history of the Great Books though, this book basically succeeds but I kind of wanted more. 2.5 of 5.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: Beam narrates the story of the Great Books movement from its beginnings with John Erskine, Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, to the publication of The Great Books by Britannica and rise of Great Books groups, the "core wars" and the remnants of this movement still hanging on today.

I have probably been intrigued and tempted by the Great Books idea all of my life. I remember looking with envy at the Britannica set acquired by a friend of mine and was probably saved from acquiring one myself only by my wife's very sensible questions: "where are you going to put those?" and "are you going to read them?" Still, along the way, I've attempted to read at least some of these, usually in annotated editions (the Britannica set is not), guided by Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book and Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan.

So it was with some interest that I picked up Alex Beam's book which is neither hagiography nor hatchet job, but a highly readable, and a times humorous, look at the Great Books movement and particularly its two principle lights: Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler.

The book traces the beginnings to various "great books" lists, most notably Charles Eliot's at Harvard, which eventuated in the Harvard Classics, Adler's initial inspiration. Adler was mentored by John Erskine, who advocated for the great books at Columbia in the General Honors course, which eventually Adler taught as a graduate student in the 1920s. Erskine, Adler, and Clifton Fadiman also taught courses for working adults beginning the dual character of Great Books promotion in the academy and in "middlebrow" circles among working people seeking a broader perspective on life.

Then enters Hutchins who invites Adler to Yale in 1927, and then to the University of Chicago, when Hutchins became president in 1929. Together they sought to reform undergraduate education around a Great Books curriculum and later promoted Great Books groups among the public culminating in the Great Books Foundation to promote these groups. Within four years (by the late 1940s) they claimed there were 2,500 such groups meeting across the country.

William Benton's involvement was a key moment in the Great Books movement. A consummate salesman and member of a Chicago Great Books group, he acquires Encyclopedia Britannica and proposes publishing a collection of "the Great Books". Adler, Hutchins, and Erskine oblige and Beam narrates the sometimes hilarious process by which certain books were included or excluded by this committee of white males, selecting largely a collection of books by white males. He also gives a detailed account of Adler's signature contribution to this project, The Syntopicon, an index of 102 ideas with references to where they arise in the Great Books. Beam describes the questionable marketing techniques used to lure middle-class families to acquire an impressive looking set of books most would barely read.

The rest of the book is an account of the gradually dwindling sales and disappointments of both Adler and Hutchins, the "core wars" which eliminated many of these works from college curricula at most universities, offset by the narratives of those whose lives were profoundly touched by the Great Books, and the collegiate holdouts, like St. John's in Annapolis and Santa Fe, where the Great Books are the curriculum. He concludes with describing Great Books weekends where, although he is "of a certain age" he is the youngest person in the room.

One wonders in reading this if Adler and Hutchins had two principle faults: inflexibility and codifying the Great Books into a published set. Beam contrasts this movement with Oprah's book club (which probably has Adler and Hutchins turning in their graves). I would add the attention book recommendations receive from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Neither are recommending fluff books and there is always a spike in books sales around their recommendations. While it is true there are many adults who only read a few books a year, and that mostly contemporary popular fiction, there are those who recognize that something was missing in their education, and are looking for help in enlarging their horizons.

What if, instead of pouring their efforts into dubious marketing of the Great Books sets, Adler and Hutchins had worked to develop annotated works, and good discussion guides, and maybe excluded some of the more challenging and obscure ancient mathematical and scientific works? What if they had shown a more enlightened approach that recognized great works like W. E. B DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk and other works by those not in the "dead white male" tradition? Might they have forged a literacy movement that would have embraced all Americans and avoided the "core wars?" Maybe not, and it is clear that this just was not their vision. What Beam's book makes clear is that it was this truncated vision, and not the American populace that was to blame for their disappointments.

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book much more than I was able to. I am one of those geeky Great Books nerds who has been a student in the extension school (Basic Program at UChicago) for more than 30 years. Our program was very similar to the seminars given to all students at St. John's. I have read most of the books discussed in this book. I will sum up my experience doing this reading: they are really hard and really interesting. I will agree that the translations are important and it's helpful if all in a group use the same translation. Reading these books has changed my world.

I was also interested in the stories of the "personalities" mentioned in the book especially Adler (who I heard speak once) and the fights over which books were included and which were not.

But this was not a great book itself. Several times I thought: "Didn't I just read this sentence two pages ago?" And I learned that despite my desire to own a complete set of these books, that technically they are hard to read due to type size and page layout. I concentrate on getting the best translations of each book rather the the decorative series itself.

[D Dyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is more of a loose introductory survey then a path to becoming well-versed in the development of the western canon. Beam tells an interesting story and gives us sketches of some of the important figures involved in at least the university of Chicago‘s entry in codifying the Canon. But while I felt that I got a glimpse of the sort of people reading the great books then and now and the sort of people who felt that they were important I’m not sure that I ever got more than a glimpse and even then of only a small part of that academic world. This isn’t a bad place to start for someone interested in the subject but it’s not a book that will spark an interest you don’t already have and it’s not one that will satisfy your interest completely.

[Todd N · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a strange and mean little book, not that I mind all that much.

Mr. Beam isn't writing directly about the Great Books. Instead he is writing about the Great Books movement, a sort of fetishistic devotion to the Great Books.

The book follows the lives and careers of the two main people whose love of the Great Books took corporeal form with their publication in 100 pounds and 60 shelf-inches of book-mass by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1952. And then again in 1990.

Along the way Mr. Beam touches on some genuinely fascinating and important topics like
-the commoditization of culture,
-whether a college education is to prepare for work or for life,
-culture as a status marker,
-the general purpose of education,
-the relevance of Western culture in American life,
-the culture wars of the 90s,
-the adoption of "the Canon" by conservative thinkers.

Sadly, he decides to only touch them and not explore any further. Instead the author focuses on personalities and personal failings of the people who brought out these books. We learn that Dr. Adler had extramarital affairs and had a hard-to-please father. Another character had a hard-to-please mother. Dr. Hutchins glides through a life of unfulfilled potential only to say at the end of it that he probably should have died at 35.

[[[Aside: I think that far too many journalists are writing books these days. Like that long tail guy and Malcolm Gladwell and the author of this book. I think there is a tendency of journalist-authors to skim the surface and focus instead on personalities and proof-by-anecdote. At best books like these provide tantalizing glimpses of the truth and at worst they substitute actual expertise in a field with a "telling" detail or clever adjective about someone who actually is an expert in a field.]]]

Along the way Mr. Beam charmingly defends the Great Books themselves by explaining how reading them has affected him. He sits in on some Great Books discussions that sound like they were very funny.

I am now on the look out at the used bookstores that I haunt for The Great Books as published by EB. They sound truly horrible with their 10 point, double column type, no footnotes or introductory notes. I have to see them for myself.

Also, I am interested in checking out the scientific works that they published. In contradiction to what most people think, I find reading old science texts kind of interesting (in small amounts I should add). It's sort of like looking at a score for a symphony that one is already familiar with.

For a review of the EB's Great Books, check out this excellent review from The New Yorker (1952):

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilrei...

One laugh out loud moment: There is a passage where someone at Columbia who mentions how the athletes were terrible at the Great Books discussions. Then she follows up with "and the engineering students were worse."

[Eric_W · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am really enjoying this book. The author treats the principle characters, Hutchins and Adler, with respect but a lot of irony. I had a set - which remained mostly unread but a great source of quotations - and their tiny print and double-column layout of 443 all-white-male works reinforced one quip: "The Great Books were icons of unreadability."

Nevertheless, over a million sets were sold for hundreds of dollars each, at a time when hundreds of dollars was a lot more than today. By the seventies, sales had fallen off a cliff even after an attempt to make them more "relevant" by adding some women authors.

The book has all sorts of interesting tidbit about the evo9lution of our educational system. Hutchins and Adler, along with Dewy and Eliot really dragged Yale and Harvard kicking and screaming out of the 17th century mold of only Latin, Greek and Rhetoric classes, by introducing -- horror -- electives.

Only St. John's College force-feeds the Great Books' through all four years of its curriculum today. James Payn, now a forgotten novelist, said of the set "Here are the most admirable and varied materials for the formation of a prig." Perfect description of William Bennett.

Hutchins, and presumably Adler, believed that metaphysics should play the most important role in undergraduate education. He wrote in his book The Higher Learning in America that "the aim of higher education is wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge of principles and causes. Metaphysics deals with the highest principles and causes. Therefore metaphysics is the highest wisdom." Perhaps a weak logical string. Nevertheless, students could not gain this wisdom by sitting in class listening to teachers lecture, nor from textbooks. That became the great role for (sound the trumpets) THE GREAT BOOKS.

"Adler and Hutchins had transformed a technique of general education into a vision of salvation; they believed their Bildungsideal could save mankind and the modern world from moral decay and physical destruction.... The Great Books movement, in short, offered an intellectual surrogate for, or supplement to, attendance in church.


Interesting review in NYTimes Book Review Nov 16, 2008

Christian Science Monitor review at http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2...

[Claire Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recent decades have seen a vigorous debate in academic circles and society at-large over the relevance of the Western Canon and the "dead white males" who dominated it. In "A Great Idea at the Time," Alex Beam takes us back to an era when the value of the great books was unquestioned. In fact, in post-World War II America, they became a popular phenomenon for a while when a group of scholars at the University of Chicago selected works for a 54-volume Great Books set published and marketed by Encyclopedia Britannica. Great Books discussion groups sprang up from coast to coast. It seemed as if the United States was on the verge of a new era of enlightenment.

Not quite. In this lively, breezy account, Bream introduces us to some of the dominant personalities behind the Great Books phenomenon, including U of C President Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, the everyman's philosopher. We learn that the two-volume "syntopicon" (an index of 102 "great ideas" examined in the works), Adler's brainchild, proved to be so labor-intensive and expensive to produce it almost bankrupted the project. Beam also recounts the failure of the initial marketing efforts, revealing that the Great Books only took off when Britannica's door-to-door salesmen resorted to deceptive practices that twice brought the wrath of the Federal Trade Commission down on the Britannica organization. Beam explores the decline of the Great Books phenomenon as well, and takes us to places where their influence remains: St. John's College in Annapolis, where the books make up the entire four-year curriculum; and to the dwindling remnants of the Great Books discussion groups, where (mostly) aging enthusiasts still seek enlightenment in these ancient pages. Beam's narrative, while witty and engaging, is buttressed by solid reporting and research. Recommended.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tells the origin story of the Great Books movement in the U.S. from its beginnings at Columbia University in the 1920s to its continuation and expansion at the University of Chicago, followed by the founding of St. John’s College in Maryland. (side comment: I’ve only known 2 people who did the St. John’s thing – one loved it, the other had to drop out because he was failing, and this failure haunted him for years.)

The Great Books movement was launched by colorful and controversial academics led by Mortimer J. Adler (author of the still in-print How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading) and University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins. In parallel with embedding the Great Books into core curricula was the creation of an ambitious publishing project, the Great Books of the Western World, put out by Britannica and the University of Chicago. This sparked a kind of commercial hucksterism in the 1950s and 60s, when door-to-door salesmen would sell these expensive volumes (50 to a set, bound in faux leather) to middle America in the same way that many families acquired sets of Encyclopedia Britannica in the hopes that their children would actually open up the volumes and read the articles. (Some, in fact, did, but most often the volumes served as mute testimonies to cultural aspirations). At the same time, thousands of Great Books discussion groups sprouted across the country, meeting in private homes, libraries, and work places where readers gathered to ponder Descartes, Kant and Tolstoy.

I was drawn to this story because the book group I’ve been part of for the last 20 plus years was founded by long-time participants of these Great Books discussion groups and, although we don’t primarily read from a Great Books syllabus (although now that I think of it, we have tackled The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Georgics,Lucretious On the Nature of Things, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Tempest, and various Virginia Woolf novels and stories) we still follow the Great Books Foundation’s “shared inquiry” method of group discussion.

I know people who’ve sworn that Great Books changed their lives. Our first leader had been a stay-at-home mom who joined Great Books, went back to college, got a PhD in philosophy and spent the rest of her life teaching at a nearby university and leading Great Books discussions. She, and the discussion leader who followed her after she died were phenomenal, gifted discussion leaders and I’m pleased to say that even today, years later, our discussions go far beyond the evaluative, judgmental “I loved this book/I hated this book” critiques that can suck the air out of the room and derail a good discussion.

While the Great Books Foundation and its members of Bookies appear to be, sadly, aging out, a love of the Great Books hasn’t gone away. What should be on or taken off the canon is in constant, lively and healthy dispute. And for readers outside the Academy, I’m heartened to come across podcasts like “Hardcore Literature” hosted by a young man whose enthusiasm for the Great Books and what he calls “deep reading” is infectious and sure to attract new, younger readers who are looking to go beyond the latest new and (often) over-hyped novel. Carpe diem.

[Tommy V · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 1952, Encyclopedia Britannica published a 54-volume set of faux leather bound hardback books that purported to be the be all and end all of classic works covering topics from philosophy and literature to political science and mathematics. The set was entitled Great Books of the Western World. Over the next twenty years, more than one million of these sets, at a sticker price of several hundred dollars, were purchased by Americans, either for home use or as donations to schools and public libraries. Your local library may very well have a copy. Great Books discussion programs sprang up practically overnight, with adults socializing on Wednesday nights over coffee and, say, a pre-assigned reading of Dante's Inferno. Colleges incorporated Great Books classes into their curriculum, and a few offered a complete undergraduate program in the Great Books, most notably at Columbia University and the University of Chicago.

Yours truly was a product of a Great Books education, at a private West Coast college where I read the works of classic authors for four years. Therefore, it was with relish that I began reading Boston Globe journalist Alex Beam's lighthearted 2008 book, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books. Beam takes that auspicious moment in 1952 and traces both the roots and the conclusion of the Great Books movement. Along the way, he introduces us to a pair of devoted Great Books educators, the handsome and debonair Robert Maynard Hutchins and the bullying egomaniac Mortimer J. Adler.

Hutchins was well known in the education circuit as the Boy Wonder who became President of the University of Chicago when he was only 30 years old. A Yale law graduate, Hutchins claimed that he never really learned anything there except how to pass exams. When he arrived in Chicago, he made sweeping reforms to the university's education system. Among them was to instate a mandatory Great Books seminar program where literary classics were read and discussed. In this class there were no tests or final exams over which to study. The only assignment was the reading for the week. Students were expected to come prepared to raise questions and explain passages in the text. "The best education for the best is the best education for all" was Hutchins' mantra.

In contrast, Adler comes across like Sancho Panza to Hutchins' Don Quixote. There also seemed to be a bit of hero-worship on the part of Adler toward Hutchins, according to Beam. Like Hutchins, Adler was disillusioned with the rote way of learning being taught at universities. He had held this sentiment for a while--dropping out of high school to work for a newspaper in part because it gave him opportunity to satisfy his voracious reading appetite. He eventually enrolled in Columbia where he fell in love with the school's core program of classic works.

What united the two was, of course, their love for the Great Books. Hutchins invited Adler to teach at Chicago and, with the help of investors, they hatched the idea to mass-market a set of Great Books that would eventually be sold door-to-door by a troupe of wily salesmen. Enter Encyclopedia Britannica and a round table of some of the most distinguished university thinkers to help select the books.

Some of the more humourous moments in Beam's book are when the group debates what is a Great Book. He concludes that, much like the Meese report on pornography, Hutchins & Co. could not always define it, but they knew it when they saw it. Silly grandstanding ("Voltaire will be dropped over my dead body"--it was, but the one who exclaimed that, Mark Van Doren, survived) and an obstinate devotion to medieval scientific thought were but two of the more unusual parts of the debate. However, with Hutchins and Adler having final say over the list, a set of authors was eventually hammered out.

The set of books were a modest success, despite some critical knocks on it. Cries of elitism were heard, but a more practical critique was that the books contained no outside sources to aid the reader. The books were meant to stand by themselves, meaning there were no footnotes or background information provided for the works, and very little was written about the authors, save for a short one-page biography. Poorly chosen English translations did little to help matters. Furthermore, the print was set in two-column type so small that it strained the eyes to read for more than a few pages at a time. Nevertheless, the set provided paychecks and notoriety for Hutchins and Adler, who established seminar facilities in such tony weekend getaways as Santa Barbara and Aspen, respectively, where they invited corporate big-wigs to gather and discuss the Great Books, naturally.

Beam follows Hutchins and Adler until the end of their lives, through their failed marriages and relationships with their peers. After their deaths, the book starts to lose steam, as if Beam were writing a novel, had just killed off his two main characters, and needed to pad the book to get to a full 200 pages. He devotes a chapter to a few of the "noble savages" that Hutchins and Adler envisioned would benefit from these books, a rather specious topic. Another chapter relates his experience at a weekend Great Books seminar. Two other chapters explore the continuing programs at Chicago, Columbia, and St. John's in Annapolis, where the entire curriculum is devoted to the Great Books. He writes of these Great Books followers with the air of a bemused observer. "Oh, aren't these people cute," he says in so many words, "running around discussing Newton and Copernicus like it’s the 17th century."

Beam's thoughts seem to reflect the idea of the day. By the time I was in college (the late 1980s), the Great Books program was under attack in a series of campus culture wars. The "dead, white, male" authors that the program touted were viewed as being out of touch with the demands of a global world. Beam takes that sentiment and extrapolates it to make it the cause for the failure of a 1990 revised edition of the Great Books, which was spearheaded by Adler and proved to be a financial disaster to Encyclopedia Britannica.

I expected Beam to conclude his book by mocking the value of the Great Books, and perhaps a liberal arts education. After all, he hardly lets a page go by without an aside. He also freely admits to not being familiar with many of the authors found in the Great Books, a fact I thought was rather odd for someone who was an English major. However, in the end he seems to have been won over by the books. Though he would hardly champion them, he appreciated the quality of the Sherwood Anderson story he read at his weekend seminar over a trashy paperback novel he picked up at the airport on his way home. So, I guess he is kind of giving the Great Books idea a mild "thumbs up," which is about what I give his book.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining enough ...

but it’s not one of the Great Books. Seriously, though, this was a competent romp through the history field the Treat Books of the Western World, as a teaching paradigm and a publishing program. He makes a solid case, especially that the great scientific works do not provide a great deal of contemporary value, as science only proceeds on the theories that can be disproven but have not been, rather than a tradition. (I expected him to point out that a key tension in the modern world has been the breaking of ties with Aristotelian traditions, allowing new discoveries that were contrary to Aristotle.

However, much of the book appears opposed to the idea that there can be a canon, however opened to include women and minorities. Yet, we know that “classics” such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication is the Rights of Women, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, will continue to “teach and delight” readers. From my point of view, perhaps narrow, the failure of the Great Books of the Western World as a publishing project is paradoxically in its overselling of a too-expensive series and its lack of quality control in choosing the cheapest translations and typesetting the books for value, not readability. The author does call these out, in a great deal of detail.

He could point out a more successful program, that has a similar goal: The Library of America. This program avoided several of the pitfalls of the GBWW program. It does not assume that it has a comprehensive list of the best books. Instead, it attempts to provide “America’s greatest writing in authoritative new editions.” In many cases, the best scholarship has produced definitive editions, including content previously edited out. The books have comprehensive timelines of the authors and their times, providing a context that the GBWW volumes lack. The volumes are readable, have stay open spines, and have been more inclusive of women and minorities. These editions are sold by subscription, but also, and perhaps more commonly, as individual titles. Over time, many of the individual titles have been released in paperback, and these are only sold individually, not by subscription. The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade was the inspiration for this series, envisioned by Edmund Wilson and commencing publication in 1982, ten years after Wilson’s death, this publication has been running continuously and (it appears) successfully for 37 years.

[Roger Burk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beam takes a flippant and dismissive attitude towards the movement to popularize the "Great Books of the Western World" for mass consumption in the 1930s through 60s. The story focuses on Robert Hutchins, wunderkind and onetime president of the University of Chicago; the indefatigable, single-minded, and abrasive Mortimer Adler; and their creation and marketing of Britannica's edition of the book set. Sales were disastrously slow at first, but picked up in the 1950s and early 60s when pushed by unscrupulous door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen. Beam suggests that the effort was doomed from the start because many of the works are long, dense, turgid, technical, or otherwise unreadable, and I guess he has a point. The parallel successful effort to develop the Great Books as the framework for a college education, most prominently at St. John's College (of which I am an alumnus), is covered much more lightly--basically one chapter. In the last chapters there is some grudging acknowledgement that reading these texts continues to mean a lot to a fair number of people and can be very intellectually stimulating. Beam gives nothing about the current resurgence of interest in great-books education, especially for K-12, as an alternative to politically progressive public schools. Mostly he provides a peak into the curious and fervid life of Mortimer Adler.

[Liam Prato · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a perfect little book written just for me! I love the way Beam pokes fun at Adler over and over again for his hubris (his hubris is not too different from my hubris, which forces some self reflection!). Witty and concise and yet wholly satisfactory in scope.

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A kind of snarky and condescending look back at "middlebrow" culture and people and libraries talked into buying the great books set and never opening them. Admittedly, I never read Tristram Shandy but I read some or all of most volumes, including Apollonious, ridiculed in this text, Ptolemy, Harvey, Darwin, and other supposedly unreadable science books. Fie! I'm not that impressed with Adler or Hutchins, and the Syntopicon never did a thing for me -- but reading Apology and Crito at age 12, that was something.

[Jim]

This is on my to read list and thinking once again about it.

Two Reasons-
1) Just heard him on Thursday's Jim and Margery Show
http://alexbeam.net/gbh-radio-segment/
a funny guy.
2) I own a set of Harvard Classics which are similar to the Great Books. I bought them when I was first engaged. I will never read them ....... They are, as Alex Beam says, on my un-bucket list.

[Jeff Zell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not know that the Great Books of the Western World (GRWW) set existed until about 17 years ago. I was in a family's home visiting. The husband had previously mentioned reading the GRWW set, but I did not have the time to inquire what he was talking about. When I went into his home, prominently displayed on shelves so that it is among the first things a visitor sees was his GBWW set.

There was a conversation about that set and his reading of it. Ever since then I have been intrigued by the idea of a canon of literary thought or that certain books can be considered "great" and must reads while others, not so much. I was also interested in learning who decides what is in the canon as well as the criteria.

At that point in time, I had not, and still have not read, the vast majority of the books in the set.

I have looked at the set at used book stores, but upon looking through the pages, I found the print to difficult to read for more than a few minutes because of the type of type as well as the smallness of the type.

I was faintly aware of the set's origins and who was behind it, but that was it. Well, that all changed with Beam's excellent introduction to the set, its origin, its sale, and how it satisfied an anxiety of a growing middle class after WWII.

Beam gives us history and profiles of the main personalities behind the books. He is a journalist with the Boston Globe and he entertains the reader as he tells the GBWW story. And, what a story it is.

The GBWW were relentlessly promoted by Adler and Hutchinson. And, they were sold by aggressive door to door foot-in-the-door salesmen. The advertising was persistent in the media of the 50's and 60's.

One of the spin off organizations from the GBWW is the Great Books Foundation which created materials for use in book clubs. The Foundation's work continues. There are Great Book seminars and weekends still. Who knew? As it turns out, Beam did not know either until he followed up on an email inquiry from one of his readers.

Beam's investigation is thorough. He interviewed, read, and probed. He participated in the Great Book weekends. The result is an engaging book on the Great Books.

[Brandt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pithy introduction before I begin my review. First, about me: I love philosophy, I love political theory. These are my obsessions. When it comes to reading, I prefer the prose of writers such as, John Stuart Mill, David Hume, and Bertrand Russell(you really must read Free Man's Worship; who would ever of thought Russell was such a hopeless existentialist?). If I am in an acutely inquisitive mood, I appreciate reading John Rawls, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, and my personal favorite, Martin Heidegger.

I had just finished re-reading Mill’s On Liberty, after abridging a particularly extended sequence of a book after book of political thought when I decided that I must return again to the beginning. You see, as part of this cycle, I had recently read Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why so many “conservative” thinkers had affirmed this book as some kind of call to action. To me, the musings of Bloom seemed antithetical and borderline inconsistent. In one position he seems to be advocating some kind of inherent right to prejudice, whilst simultaneously calling for critical thinking. I just could not seem to get passed his deep-seated psychological projectionism, and his penchant for elitist poppycock. I thought perhaps I had misread some of the works that Bloom mentioned and I took it to heart. I would now go back and find the best translations (which, awkwardly, by the way, I do think Bloom’s translation of The Republic to be of the finest quality I had ever read), of some of the “Classics”.

While I was probing the local library shelves for a good translation of Homer’s Iliad 1 I happened upon this book. Whatever system of cataloging the library was using, Alex Beam’s A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books found itself shelved right alongside the likes of Homer and Virgil. I read the dust jacket preview and decided to give it reading. Thus begins the review.

As mentioned earlier, I have spent the better half of the last six months gradually working my way through some of the more intricate political texts, and arguments, ever; at least in my opinion. Hence, the first impression I got from the introduction, and chapter one, was that this book is exceptionally readable. That makes a difference. It was almost like the disparity between work and play. While the past six months have been work, the straightforwardness of the prose used by Beam was like a vacation. This is a compliment and not a sleight. When reading through extremely challenging texts, there is always the quandary of translation apropos verbiage used during that historic period. What Beam has done is poised the readability of this work, and structured it into a coherent whole. Instead of the usual 20 – 30 pages of reading, followed by a decompression period of thinking about what was written, one can easily tackle this book in one sitting.

It is observable throughout the text that Beam is knowledgeable of not only his subject matter but, the gentle art of presenting the “story” without too much bias. To some this may seem erroneous – I have read some of the other reviews; or, should they be called critiques? Needless to say, if you were to read the “Acknowledgments,” and “Notes on Sources,” it could be easily deduced that Beam has done his investigative homework.

Another thought that came to me throughout the reading, was that this is one of the few books – outside the Classical texts – and obvious expositions by the likes of Philosopher’s viz., Edmund Husserl, Hegel, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty – where I have seen an actual discussion of important words and their meaning. Here I am referring to words like ousia [οὐσία] and arête [ἀρετή]. These words embrace concepts difficult to translate into English and I was happy to read the attempts by Beam to do such. Beam is absolutely correct in his exposition of students that study ancient texts and ideas. I can attest (is this anecdotal evidence?) that it is hard to find anyone, outside the Ivory Towers of academia, who are willing to discuss concepts such as Being, Geist [spirit?], Despair, and my favorite quote of all time: “Das Nichts Selbst Nichtet”. Yet, these very “ideas” permeate the core of humanity.

Ultimately, I would like to thank Alex Beam for providing a tiny interruption to my progress (or is it really?) of attempting to understand the great thinkers of history. I have culled many ideas from reading this book, and I hope that when a critical reflection is done by others who read it, they will also see some usefulness in the pages.

Lastly, I would not worry very much about the “star” rating. It is very rare for me to give any book five stars. Nonetheless, this book is a solid three and that means I enjoyed it for the recreational value. Now, it is back to finishing off some reading by Gerald A. Cohen on his critique of Rawls in Rescuing Justice and Equality. Who knows, perhaps one day, hundreds of years from now, someone will be reading Cohen as a great of the ancient thinkers?

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beam's book is a history of the Great Books of the Western World -- the book sets by Britannica, the colorful characters who developed and marketed them, and the effort to get them into middle-class homes of America in the 1950s/60s and beyond. The obvious flaws in the canon represented by the set are noted - books by black, idigenous, and authors of color are non-existent in the first editions and only a handful added later in a 1990 edition. This isn's a book arguing for/against the canon as much as it is a tour of the people and events in the story of the Great Books set. I found it interesting because I've always been curious about the book set (which we certainly couldn't have afforded when I was a kid), and the curriculum of St. John's college (Annapolis, Santa Fe) remains grounded entirely in the Great Books. So the book satisfied my curiosity about how this particular idea and set came to be. If you're interested in that, the publishing/marketing of book sets, or efforts to introduce scholarly works to mainstream audiences, this is a good read. If you're more interested in what it's like to read/engage in the Great Books themselves, especially long after formal school years, I'd recommend movie critic David Denby's "Great Books" - about his return to Columbia at age 48 to take Western civilization/Literary Humanities courses in an effort to judge the criticism of the canon for himself.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

a pleasant surprise, given i picked it up on a whim at the checkout because it was £2 and sounded vaguely interesting. it's the sort of entertaining, easy read you'd expect from a journalist's book, recounting the history through the lives of the eccentric characters behind the movement in broadly sympathetic terms.

it traces the idea from its early days as a pedagogical curio (anyone can get a broad education from just a handful of books and some intense tutorials!) as it evolves into a serious tendency in univsersity education, and then on into a weird simulacrum of its original self. eventually it feels like the books have almost become magical talismans, utterly separated from their contents. thus you end up with a 30,000 page series of fake-leather-bound books that looks great on your shelves but is borderline illegible and lacks any of the supplementary materials that might help readers to engage with the contents. and people trying to teach maths and science exclusively from centuries-old treatises.

i think the book's biggest failing is that, while it addresses the collection's narrow and idiosyncratic choices, it never really questions the fundamental concept of a western literary canon.

[Nichola · Rating 3 out of 5]

An look at the idea that people in college and elsewhere should be developing their minds by reading the 'Great Books' of the Western World as defined by whoever claims to be an authority. The specifics covered in this take are largely around a couple of guys who decided the University of Chicago and the Encyclopedia Britannica should convince people in order that they could sell them an expensive set of books which were often donated and rarely opened. A lot of ground is covered here, including the fact that some college curriculums are still based on this idea, rather than continuously moving the knowledge base forward, and that people still meet to discuss books, which does not seem that odd.

[Pierce Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought a set of Great Books in 1986, so that does make me biased. I found this history fascinating and informative. The book has also rekindled my enthusiasm to read more; it has also confirmed for me that some of the authors will go unread. For my 21 year old self who just received my set of Great Books, Homer's Iliad was a very tough read - not an enjoyable translation. The Odyssey was much better. Most of all I am grateful for the Plato. It was Plato/Socrates that really sparked my interest in classical learning. Like all things the Great Books has its strengths and weaknesses. Alex Beam has presented a balanced look into this collection and the people who learn from them.

[Avi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really interesting history of the Great Books movement of the 1950s. Beam paints a really compelling picture of the dynamic that the two heads of the movement, Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, had and their efforts to spread it. I wish though that Beam would devote more attention to the "curious afterlife" portion of the story than he did. I think more attention devoted to the shift away from the Great Books in the mainstream but their resurgence in certain Conservative circles would have really made this stronger

[Hubert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this overview of the history of the "Great Books" program from the 1950s onward. The most interesting material is actually the discussion of the relationships between Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, and how the University of Chicago played a role in the development of the program. The book resonates in today's age, particular as we continue to display anxieties about canonization, knowledge, cultural literacy, and who gets to be included in a collection that purports to represent the great ideas of human knowledge.

[Kelly-Kate Crossland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book despite the left-leaning, east coast bias of the author. I actually thought the bias made the book funnier. I also tend to like books that highlight the ridiculous personalities of academics. This one delivers on that point. Academics are hilarious because they are strange people with huge egos. The story is the same here with Mortimer Adler.