Customer Reviews

The Book of Great Books: A Guide to 100 World Classics

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Let's face it. Who is the most likely reader of THE BOOK OF GREAT BOOKS by W. John Campbell? Probably the same people who buy Monarch Notes, Cliff's Notes, and the like. That is students in high school and college who doubt that they lack the time, inclination, or ability to plow through a series of novels, poems, plays, and essays. What Campbell's book does is to break down what seems an imposingly difficult work of literature so that after ten minutes a reader can get a sense of the 'big picture.' Campbell has chosen 100 of the generally accepted classics of English, American, European, and Greek and Roman works that have survived the test of time to be called that. Each work is divided into a plot summary, a handy picture that connects the major characters in terms of how they relate, the background, key characters, themes, symbols, style, structure, and critical overview.
The level of detail and the degree of analysis is just enough to permit the reader to follow the work and still retain the joy of reading the original. Nowhere does Campbell bog the reader down in detail sufficiently heavy to cause him to wonder why he bought TBGB in the first place. One of the problems that I had in reviewing this book is that Campbell makes no attempt to discuss exactly what a great book is and why he chose the one hundred that he did. I would have appreciated an introduction which could have clarified those two points. As it is, TBGB is simply a valuable addition to the bookshelf of anyone who likes to think that he is a reader of the classics.

FACT: Each book is summarized and analyzed by sections. The author summarizes the action in a chapter-by-chapter Plot Summary, which ends with a very useful Character Chart schematic thingie that makes character relationships crystal clear. (Why isn't anyone else using this kind of chart?) Background section covers type of work (epic poem, adventure novel, etc.), author's background, setting. Key Characters section gives a couple sentence overview of each. Main Themes & Ideas section has a paragraph on each theme, and in my opinion this is the most useful part in aiding understanding of each analysis. Main Symbols: self-explanatory. Style & Structure section analyzes and evaluates other literary elements of the work: language, tone, irony, figures of speech such as metaphor and simile, foreshadowing, plot and composition. Critical Overview covers the relationship of the work to the society and time from which it emerged or how critics and readers react to the work's main ideas. Each book critique is about 8 pages long. It addresses mostly the works of "classic" authors--shakespeare, conrad, virgil, homer, chaucer, miller, milton, dante, tolkien, hemingway, ibsen, dickens, swift, steinbeck, orwell, melville, austen, camus, c. bronte, hawthorne, shelley, twain, wharton--yet there are a few post-modern works too--Joy Luck Club, The Bluest Eye, Caged Bird Sings, Color Purple.
OPINION: This wonderful book deserves much more attention than it's gotten. More than just a plot summary, it's a very useful and fast guide to literary analysis and evaluation of some major Western Civlization literary works, and it would serve any high school or college student well. My sole complaint is that it only covers 100 Great Books. Desperate Comp. I and II students will love this (hint-hint!) The price was right, too.... The Main Themes & Ideas section is quite helpful in understanding the central message an author is trying to convey by his work, and it's made several hard-to-fathom plays and books easier for me to grasp. It's probably inevitable that it will be compared to Cliff Notes, yet the critiques are briefer, easier to read, more fun, and perhaps not so penetrating and comprehensive. This book ought to be on the shelf of everyone's personal library--along with a copy of How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler. Happy reading!

In "The Book of Great Books," W. John Campbell provides an overview of 100 of the world's greatest classics, both fiction and nonfiction. It includes only American and European authors, from ancient to modern times. This is an arbitrary list, of course, and some of your favorite classics may not be included. Out of curiosity, I compared these titles to those on the Random House list of the 100 best novels. 20% of the Random House titles were included here.

This volume is a sort of abridged Cliff's Notes in that it covers the historical background, summary, major characters and themes, symbolism, style, and a critical overview of each title. Reading this book is no substitute for reading the great classics themselves. Instead, this is a good reference book to consult when you are trying to recall the name of a character or a detail from the plot of a book you read a while ago. This book is now back in print as a Barnes & Noble publication.

This book is a must have for anyone in highschool, college, or just want to read as many books as possible in a limited time period. It takes you through many or the classic books and stories such as Jane Eyre, Animal Farm, The Lord of the Rings, and many of Shakespeare's works. This book gives you summaries of the stories, describes characters and symbols in the stories and much more. This is your best friend when it comes to writing book reports or understanding a story. I absolutely love this book. Also the price was fantastic. You could not buy the 100 books this book contains for the price of this book.

This book was instrumental in helping me as a new literature teacher construct lesson plans for my English classes. I have shared it with other literature teachers, and they also have appreciated its concise, yet thorough analysis of some of the great literature of our culture.

I love literature and teach it to homeschool high school students. This book is so helpful!

This of course can be a way to find out about these specific books and experience something about them for the first time. With plot summaries, historical backgrounds, and even chapter reviews this is a good tool and reference book.

The book claims to have found 100 "Great Books" and it's presentation is a choice on what is felt to be "great". The books chosen do qualify as "great" in that they represent significant ideas and thoughts from individuals who have made a difference in literature. The books are ones that can be read over and over.

There are many ways to find a list of 100, or many more books, thought to be significant. Most lists will enable one to check off what he has read and what may be missing. This collection enables one to stop and re review not only what one has missed but also what has already be read and the format is such that you can quickly bring back to memory all that you enjoyed when you first read the book.

If you just love books then you will probably have several books that point you towards what is thought to be the "best books". This guide is well done, presented in a useful format and worth having.

The works reviewed in this book are largely works of literature as opposed to, say, philosophy; Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason don't show up. This would already make one knit his eyebrows in suspicion, but far worse is the total absence of classical works of NON-WESTERN literature. (I don't count Amy Tan because her works are written in ENGLISH.) Where is Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji? Where are the four classic Chinese novels, namely the Outlaws of the Marsh, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Journey to the West (also titled Monkey), and the Dream of Red Mansions (also titled the Story of the Stone)? Where are the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata? Or the Persian epic Shanameh? Or the Tibetan epic King Gesar of Ling? And what about the Sufi poets, such as Rumi, Attar and Omar Khayyam? If you don't want to include non-Western authors, I'm sure it can't hurt that much to be a bit modest and modify the title of your book to something like 'A Guide to 100 Classics of the WESTERN World'. The intended message is clear: non-Western cultures are too stupid and barbaric ever to produce any great literature. It is sad that fascism should still be alive and well in the 21st Century. Glad that this book has gone out of print, though. May it and the likes of it remain so -- out of print.