69 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Accessible book; Like the Great Books hoped to be, November 19, 2008
This review is from: A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (Hardcover)
As a recently returned veteran in the spring of 1971 I was desperate to make some money. So I took a job with Britannica selling "Great Books of the Western World" door to door. I lasted about two weeks. One guy I talked with didn't want to buy the set because the books didn't include pictures. An older gentleman with every encyclopedia ever printed on his shelves balked at the set's colors. Another woman, however, who seemed very interested in the content of the books, backed off because she didn't like the small print. She also had some things to say about the translation being used in the sample book in my presentation. I quit Great Books and got a job driving an ice cream truck that summer - made a lot more money.
Some years later, now an educator myself, I was in a used book store and saw a set of Great Books, along with 21 yearbooks and a set of introductory lesson plans for the bargain price of $150. I bought them and much to my wife's horror unpacked them in our small study and put them up on our bookshelves. About a year later she made me take them to work, where they adorn my office. I've read a couple of the volumes cover to cover, browsed through many others. But that woman in 1971 was right; some of the translations are terrible, and now at age 60, I agree with her that the print is too small.
Alex Beam's book "A Great Idea at the Time" took me on a nice whirlwind tour of the making and marketing of the GBWW. The story includes dynamic characters like Robert Hutchins, boy wonder/genius who as President of the University of Chicago made the 'great books' curriculum a national phenomenon. Hutchins had a populist approach to education and brought in top notch minds to teach the great works to America's future. Along with Hutchins is Mortimer Adler - another brilliant young mind who co-taught the great books courses. Adler wrote more than 60 books, including one called "Aristotle for Everybody." Anyone who truly believes that "everybody' should read Aristotle has to be a populist thinker.
Beam doesn't try (thankfully) to get too philosophical about the campaign to popularize some of the western world's most difficult philosophical, political, and historical writings (ever try to read Hegel? Gibbon? never mind the works of Lavoisier). He states the obvious - there are many works in the original 54 volune set that are unreadable/shouldn't be read, and Adler & Co. used antiquated translations of other works to avoid paying out commissions to translators. I have read several translations of Aeschylus's Oresteia Trilogy (I have taught it to high school kids in Boston) and G.M. Cookson's has to be the the least readable. Beam merely acknowledges this weakness (Achilles Heel perhaps?) of the GBWW.
In today's dumbed down culture, writing any kind of a book about the so-called "Great Books" is a step forward. Beam may poke a bit of fun at the presumptuousness and the snake oil aspects of the marketing of the books, but there is no question where his sympathies lie with regard to the importance of treating education as a lifelong pursuit.
Toward the end of the book, Beam lists off some people and programs that take some form of 'great books' approach to education. While the Britannica set itself doesn't sell much anymore, the idea still flourishes. As for me, I now work in an educational program for veterans, and in one writing class our students (ages range from early 20s to late 60s) read and write about many of the classics Hutchins and Adler taught all those years ago. I was once looking over some essays on Plato's Allegory of the Cave and asked the instructor how he got the students so excited about readings that most would consider so difficult. His response to me was "they don't know it's supposed to be hard." I think Hutchins and Adler would have liked that.
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28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Author Needs to Read More, November 3, 2008
This review is from: A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (Hardcover)
This is a journalist's report on the follies of the Great Books idea. The two main characters in this tale turn out to be villains -- Mortimer Adler (New York Jew turned Chicago Episcopalian), and Robert M. Hutchins (Yale dean turned Chicago academic huckster). Beam's indictment is entertaining, judicious, and effective.
But alas, the book is not fully satisfactory. As it happens, the Great Book idea had been analyzed and criticized by the towering American philosopher John Dewey, and also by his student Sydney Hook. I suspected that something was amiss when I failed to find Hook's name in the index. That suspicion grew stronger when I read Beam's guileless description of his background in Dewey: "My knowledge of John Dewey comes from Jay Martin's ... 'The Education of John Dewey,' and from ... Menand's "The Metaphysical Club.'" In short, Beam has read about Dewey but not the important books and articles by Dewey. So it is not surprising to find that he lacks anything but a superficial background in the scholarly discussions of educational policy; we never learn in this book (more than superficially) just why Dewey and Hook, and others, sounded the early alarms against Great Books.
On the other hand, Beam is very good in some of his on-the-ground reporting. His visit to St. John's college (chapter Ten) and his attendance at a Great Books weekend (chapter Eleven) are both excellently reported and add substantially to our understanding of what remains of the Great Book movement.
The quality of the black-and-white photos is atrocious. The fault for this, obviously, lies with the publisher rather than with the author.
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Pop Journalism Meets Real Ideas and Agenda, September 11, 2009
I bought this book because I've been teaching the Great Books on the college level for ten years...I sold it the day after I read it...this book is bad...real bad...why? Simple - some topics are just too grand for some writers...the author is way in over his head on this topic...he speaks about the Great Books series the same way an ignorant college freshman would speak about the first class that asks him to read something more than six pages long and written above an eighth grade level...I am genuinely embarrassed for the writer and publishing company...his flippant, glib, and arrogant dismissal of weighty ideas and attempts to better a society are dismissed the way all small people dismiss things greater than themselves...by the way, the author puts forth no ideas or agendas whatsoever to better society...do yourself a favor and read a great book and not a terrible book about the Great Books
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