| A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books | 
 enlarge | Author: Alex Beam
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy New: $13.95
You Save: $11.00 (44%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 23377
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.6 x 1
ISBN: 1586484877
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.91
EAN: 9781586484873
ASIN: 1586484877
Publication Date: November 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: first edition, very faint pencil mark on blank inside page, otherwise pristine
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Product 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 Lucretiuss De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not?
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 Great Book about Great Books January 6, 2009
Loved this book. Informative and well written with much humor and a certain balance in the perspective. Provides a detailed history of Great Books with an inside look at the people involved, their idealism as well as crass commercialism. Documented arguments over which books to include are amusing. Made me want to read more of this stuff.
 "Dead White Males" are cool! December 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
How well I remember my Dad warning me against majoring in what he called "farts and litters" in college! Ironically, as a longtime member of the Jesuits, he himself had a classical education, including a healthy dose of readings from what used to be known as "the Western canon" but what is now sometimes disparaged as the roll call of "the dead white males." In this book, Alex Beam provides a lively, humorous, and entertaining survey of the mid-20th-century push to make the "canon" accessible to a mass audience, in the form of Encyclopedia Britannica's GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD. The "Great Books" still serve as the focus of the traditional "core curricula" at such schools as Columbia University, St. John's College, Shimer College, and Thomas Aquinas College, but they have largely been abandoned elsewhere for reasons more or less convincing. The drive to make the likes of Faraday, Gibbon, and Aristophanes (... "ridiculous"!! Hi, Odd Couple fans!) after-dinner reading for middle-class families turned out to be a non-starter, though some aging acolytes have kept the flame burning with "Great Books Discussion Groups."
In retrospect, the original GREAT BOOKS collection had two fatal flaws: It provided absolutely no ancillary material to help inexperienced readers cope with obscure language and concepts (let's not even talk about the misguided inclusion of classic texts of science and mathematics; I've read excerpts from these and trust me, you MUST have a guide to get through those!) and the quality of its printing was atrocious (minuscule type, double-column format). That being said, I happen to think that a judicious use of readings from original sources is a necessary part of liberal education. You simply need to avoid the trap of providing "too much of a good thing."
Thanks to the work of Allan Bloom and such defenders of the traditional academy as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, defenses of the "Great Books" have come to be associated with political conservatism. Beam seems to think that this is a strike against them, and this is the one major flaw in his argument. Why should he be so surprised? Colleges have trivialized and dumbed down their curricula to such an extent that SOME form of dissent is inevitable, and, given the prevailing political ethos on modern campuses, it is natural that conservatives should be placed in the position of defending what has been dismantled. Nor is the current "Great Books" movement a political monolith. Some "Great Books" schools have a conservative political bent, but St. John's and Shimer, among others, do not. Judging by the anecdotal evidence Beam provides, participants in "Great Books Discussion Groups" include a fair number of people on the left. The whole idea of using "Great Books" is to bring fundamental ideas into the spotlight for open and vigorous debate, and that's something on which both fair-minded liberals and fair-minded conservatives should be able to agree. Let's use readings from original sources more often in ALL colleges, I say. Just don't expect me -- or anyone else -- to read Apollonius' CONICS without a few judiciously positioned nets.
Very Good December 18, 2008
I bought the book for my husband, who frequently refers to classic books
in his lectures. We have most of the Great Books in paperback format from
the 1950's when I participated in Great Books discussions. My husband is
very pleased with this book.
Re-exploring the Canons of Liberal Education and Thought December 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Author Alex Beam looks at the 20th century "Great Books" movement that aimed to capture the essential tomes of Western Thought. He deftly traces the tug of war between education and hucksterism in trying to sell a daunting collection of demanding classics. The broader issue is one of defining, what is a liberal education? What books or works are canonical? What efforts should be made to embrace diversity in such a canon, or limit the list to "dead white males"?
Beam's tone is often snarky and supercilious, which is a distraction from his interesting narrative.
If you are interested in "the classics" or liberal education, you may enjoy "A Great Idea at the Time."
 A total embarrasment December 9, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
During the 1950s, University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins and philosopher Mortimer Adler tried but failed to inveigle the public into laying out serious money for an editorially feckless, unreadable, shelf-warping set of Great Books, plus an unusable two-volume index, The Syntopicon, listing snippets wherein canonical authors pronounced themselves on exactly102 Great Ideas, each introduced by Adler in a breezy Thomistic overview.
Hutchins and Adler also founded The Great Books Foundation to promote the Great Set (or partial reprints) for use in reading groups, schools, and colleges. Over time, the Foundation and its founders parted company on key issues. Until the second edition (1994), for example, Adler had famously refused to include works by women or persons of color, long a part of the Foundation's expanded canon. Also in dispute was method, with socratic questioning, reshaped by the Foundation as "shared inquiry", supplanting the Adler's heavy-handed didacticism and Hutchins's tetchy one-upmanship.
All of this could have made for fascinating reportage, but poorly grounded, loosely structured, and chock-a-block with red herrings, straw men, and ad hominem attacks on the protagonists, this tome rests on at least three doubtful presumptions: 1. If packaging and marketing are suspect, the product can't be worth much. (More broadly, the author seems cynical about western, or any other, culture which he razzes whenever he can find an excuse.) 2: Careful construction, analysis, and critique of arguments about so-called masterpieces of human achievement (as well as the controversies surrounding their interpretation) simply waste energy. And most importantly: 3. A Great Idea at the Time is exempt from generally accepted standards of reasoning, evidence, and rhetoric.
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