A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books($15.46Value)

Description

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 themselves: Have I read Lucretius's De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not? Alex Beam clearly has an eye for definitive and damning details: nearly every reviewer repeated his observations about the Great Books of the Western World being printed in faux leather and in nearly unreadable type, as well as his characterization of Mortimer Adler as a "Hobbit." Reviewers also contrasted (and commended) A Great Idea 's readability with the thick tomes it addresses. But several reviewers also turned Beam's wit on its head, noting that while A Great Idea is a good book, it is not a great one. Some reviewers found fault with the author's occasional tendency to sound too folksy. Others didn't know whether to treat the Great Books phenomenon as an effort to save civilization or middlebrow hucksterism—or both. So do you want to read great books, or just read about them as a phenomenon? We'll take the former. Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC Britannica Blog , December 9, 2008 “Marvelously entertaining” Alex Beam is an award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe . His writing has also appeared in the Atlantic , Slate , the New York Times and many other magazines. The author of Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital , and of two novels, he lives in Boston. Used Book in Good Condition