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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?
- Sales Rank: #903397 in eBooks
- Published on: 2008-11-04
- Released on: 2008-11-04
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Before the dawn of the television age, in an ambitious effort to enlighten the masses via door-to-door sales, Encyclopedia Britannica and the University of Chicago launched the Great Books of Western Civilization, "all fifty-four volumes of them... purporting to encompass all of Western knowledge from Homer to Freud." Led by the "intellectual Mutt 'n' Jeff act" of former University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins and his sidekick Mortimer Adler, the Great Books briefly, and improbably, caught the nation's imagination. In his discussion, Boston Globe columnist Beam looks at how and why this multi-year project took shape, what it managed to accomplish (or not), and the lasting effects it had on college curricula (in the familiar form of Dead White Males). Beam (Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital) describes meetings endured by the selection committee, and countless debates over Euripedes, Herodotus, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens and Whitman ("When it comes to Great Books, no one is without an opinion."), but tells it like it is regarding the Syntopicon they devised-at "3,000 subtopics and 163,000 separate entries, not exactly a user-friendly compendium"-and the resulting volumes, labeling them "icons of unreadability-32,000 pages of tiny, double-column, eye-straining type." By lauding the intent and intelligently critiquing the outcome, Beam offers an insightful, accessible and fair narrative on the Great Books, its time, and its surprisingly significant legacy.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
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
Review
Britannica Blog, December 9, 2008
“Marvelously entertaining”
Most helpful customer reviews
83 of 90 people found the following review helpful.
Accessible book; Like the Great Books hoped to be
By Barry Brodsky
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.
36 of 41 people found the following review helpful.
The Author Needs to Read More
By Werner Cohn
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.
53 of 63 people found the following review helpful.
A gossipy, uninteresting book.
By Paul A. Baier
Beam wrote a book about the history of the Great Books concept and specifically the set of Great Books promoted by Hutchins and Alder from the University of Chicago. I found the book unimpressive.
What is Beam's point in this meandering book? Is it a history of the Great Books or a critical commentary on the idea and movement?
Beam establishes no credibility with the reader, yet offers childish critiques and name calling, particularly of Adler: "brilliant, Hobbit-like sidekick, Mortimer Alder" (2); "William Benton, ad man and hustler extraordinaire" (2); "watching his [Adler's] endless, self-promotional television appearances was a nightmare for which I am trying to awake" (5); "low-born Adler"; "Adler, a troll next to the godlike Hutchins" (25). Is there a hidden fight between Beam and Adler? What is the point of this silliness?
Are readers to be impressed with anecdotes and gossip uncovered in working papers and interviews? Do they help the argument or discussion at all? Adler called Aspen Institute attendees business "bozos" (132). "A notorious philanderer, he [Adler] divorced his first wife" (32) . Later, Beam writes about an incident where someone recalled that "Adler was hitting on my mother" (142).
Yes, the sales methods of the Great Books were misplaced (selling culture books like crest toothpaste with door-to-door reps who deployed sleazy sales methods, receiving a reprimanded by the FTC). Beam and all of us can feel good, I guess, that these highly educated men from University of Chicago made this mistake.
What about people who said books had a big impact on their lives? He mentions numerous people including actor Julie Adams (67), Pilot Thomas Hyand (143), plumber David Call (146), Professor Montas (162), and Eva Braum. What is Beam's view here? Are these people blind worshipers in the cult of GB? Is their praise of the GB genuine and well placed? Beam gives us no answer (but thankfully he has fortunately dropped the snide personal commentary by this point in the book).
Stunningly, despite his obvious contempt for Adler and the Great Books, Beam admits that he got some enjoyment from the books. "Reading them [set of readings] en group turned out to be fun, and also hard (183). "How was this intellectual experience? - fantastic" [Beam ponders after attending a seminar] (185) . He writes "My first Great Books experience turns out to be one of my best" (185), and he enjoyed Epictetus's Handbook --"I fell in love with the gnarly-legged Stoic" (196).
Beam redeems himself a bit when he leaves his mindless commentary aside and reports historical facts from St. John's, University of Chicago, and seminars. (At least he attended a St. John class, a GB seminar and a GB weekend retreats, before writing the book.)
But, in the end, what IS his point? Does Beam even have a point of view? Does he agree or disagree with the educational premise? Is this a history book or commentary? Were the GB a good idea that was poorly packaged, marketed and sold; or are the GB a bad idea whose converts should be scorned? The sarcastic Beam does not share any view on this, presumably because he is unable to define and defend his point of view.
No one will ever mistake this book for a great, good, or even mildly interesting book.
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