36 Big Ideas

by Various

As the home to big ideas, The Great Courses has produced thousands of lectures that have introduced millions of lifelong learners to some of the biggest ideas out there. Now, enjoy 36 lectures specially curated from some of our most popular courses and get a fresh learning experience in a wide range of disciplines.

How does electromagnetic radiation traveling at 186,000 miles per second tell us everything we need to know about the distant stars? Why do we prefer random rejection over always getting what we want? How does science explain our subjective experience - if it even can? These are just a few of the many scintillating questions whose answers you'll get in this lecture series. Scientists, historians, linguists, psychologists, archaeologists, and other experts guide you through topics, concepts, and events that are sure to amaze you.

You'll learn how the world's largest untranslated written language was made with strings and knots. You'll explore the idea of time's arrow, which offers stirring insights into the one-way direction of time. You'll focus on a strange (but true) sensory phenomenon in which people associate letters with colors. You'll investigate the fascinating cultural universality hidden inside heroic journeys by characters such as Little Red Riding Hood and Arjuna in the Mahabharata. And much more.

Profound topics, deep insights, great professors - this lecture series is the perfect introduction to some of our most popular courses, and to some of the many ways in which our courses explain the seemingly unexplainable.

The complete list of contributors includes Professors Edwin Barnhart, Grant L. Voth, H. Craig Heller, Indre Viskontas, John McWhorter, and John R. Hale.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Audiobook, Religion, History

Audio CD

About the author

Various is the correct author for any book with multiple unknown authors, and is acceptable for books with multiple known authors, especially if not all are known or the list is very long (over 50).

If an editor is known, however, Various is not necessary. List the name of the editor as the primary author (with role "editor"). Contributing authors' names follow it.

Note: WorldCat is an excellent resource for finding author information and contents of anthologies.

Reviews

[Amirography · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice sampler. but a bit of a bore.

[Alex Shrugged · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a sampler of various Great Courses. It covers lectures on Christianity from an academic viewpoint, philosophy, astronomy and astrophysics, interesting ideas about cancer research, and a host of other things. Samplers encourage one to look more into the full course. For a few of these subjects, it has made me more interested.

There were some subjects in which I was not interested at all, and seemed a little silly, so this course lost a star.

I might listen to the audiobook again but more selectively on which lectures.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of these are in no way big ideas. And a selection of them aren't even taken seriously anymore.

[Zina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a neat, albeit misnamed, sample of Great Lecture series with 36 short lectures on a whole lot of interesting topics from the Renaissance cuisine to the nature of time to how babies think, etc.
The lectures are simple and fun, and for most of us - you will learn something. I am not sure I would have got it if I'd understood that it is literally just a sampler and not a discussion of some 36 ideas - but I had lots of fun nonetheless.

[Gregg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Great Courses find the best college courses and the best lecturers when they make their product. This is a further distillation of 36 of the best lectures from across their strong portfolio. This is extremely interesting and wide-ranging. My main critique is that there was quite a bit of soft science/liberal arts. There also could have been more lectures on practical topics: war, aviation, global warming, diplomacy, politics, nutrition, and/or finance.

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

4/10

Well, there were 36 ideas, I guess I have to give them that. This was obviously not written by Bart Erhman, but his lectures were likely the most enjoyable. I get the impression that the publishers literally just took 36 freshman level lectures and recorded them, then put them into this format. Some were relatively interesting, but none were exactly novel.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, I enjoyed this enlightening sampling of lectures from various Great Courses series. However, I felt that some of the topics selected weren't as successful as others in a stand-alone format -- for these, some additional fundamental knowledge seemed to be required to fully understand the subjects, particularly while jumping in mid-series, as we are with this type of compilation.

[David Baer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The material on cosmology and astronomy, and sometimes other topics, suffers in 2019 from being more than a decade old. Overall many of the topics made me want more: they are selected lectures from the "Great Courses" series. So, it had the desired effect on me.

[Ashlyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these lectures are pretty good! Many are a bit too pop-sci and almost all of them reference earlier or later lectures that aren't included in this set, but overall I would recommend this audiobook to casual science listeners.

[Nathan Hoyt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quite a variety of really interesting stuff.

[Yuhui]

It's a good sampler. Adjust your expectation accordingly.

[Saralyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good selections of lectures, but also some boring and outdated ones. I really enjoyed some of them.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the lectures. There were a lot to learn. Worth the read.

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perfect as a background for making friendship bracelets. (Don’t want to count how many hours I’ve spent doing them.)

[Tyson Adams · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good bits, a couple of great bits, and a few meh bits.

The section by the economic historian was just utter garbage. That academic should be dragged from his office by the hair and forcibly made to actually enter a library and read at least one book. The utter lack of knowledge and understanding displayed was dangerous (although, in fairness, this does seem to be a common trait in economic historians).

[Joel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting lectures, but as others have noted, lacks overall coherency. Better taken as a sampling of THC lectures than a coherent course.