Alex Beam

A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books is the perfect read for LTers. For those unfamiliar with the concept (as I was), in the 1950's Encyclopedia Brittanica took an idea from a course at the University of Chicago to educate the american public with "Great Books of the Western World". 68 volumes of double column, 9 point text of classic works including scientific texts (can you say Ptolemy's The Almagest?) sold in faux leather bindings along with a show more Syntopicon - a cross referencing guide of all of the great ideas and which authors commented on them - for the price of $250 (this was 1952 remember) sold by door to door salesman.

Admittedly, reading about the series I felt a little uneducated at times - some of the authors included in the Great Books were completely new to me (and I went to a liberal arts college) - as Beam points out, the works' obscurity and irrelevancy were part of the problem. The initial launch included NO female authors. But the idea behind the series and the business attached to it were fascinating. This book was well written, with a fair amount of humor, at no point talking down to the reader (he doesn't expect anyone to have read, or understood, Nichomachus of Gerasa's Introduction to Arithmetic (Great Books, volume 12)) and he pokes gentle fun at an interesting concept and the people and events surrounding it. Highly recommended show less

This rather superficial book can't decide whether it's a history of McLean Hospital outside Boston, or celebrity dish about famous people who have been McLean patients, or a critique of psychiatry. It doesn't quite manage to be any of these, so it comes off as fairly meanspirited and catty. Adding to the problem is Beam's writing, which has an airy tone and seems to assert that author and reader are complicit and in agreement about Beam's negative views, coupled with Beam's lack of knowledge show more about the history and contemporary practices of psychiatry. Beam seems to relish describing treatments such as hydrotherapy and coldpacks that are not used today and would be considered bizarre in contemporary psychiatry. Because he does not place McLean's practices in the context of contemporaneous psychiatry, he implies by omission that only McLean was stupid enough to use these practices. This isn't so. Beam's knowledge of current practice also seems scant. His diagnostic impressions when he speculates are often reductive and inaccurate, and his assertions about current diagnosis and treatment are strangely incomplete.

As a person who has worked in four inpatient facilities (both public and private, both before and in the era of managed care), I find myself in vehement disagreement with statements such as "A certain cynicism attends any hospital's long-term treatment of wealthy patients who pay their bills in full and who subsidize the care of less fortunate souls" (210). I disagree not because I think that all hospitals are great, or believe wholeheartedly in their interventions, or think they don't consider their bottom line, but because this is not how hospital staff think about and talk about patients. This is Beam's cynicism, not the attitude of the majority of people working in psychiatric facilities.

For better books about psychiatric hospitals, read Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, Hunt's excellent Mental Hospital from 1962, or any of the many complex and insightful accounts by patients and staff alike. show less

A good, short look at the collision of two momentous egos. Beam comes down hard on Nabokov in a way to which I'm unaccustomed: everyone (myself included) fawns over him (damn straight)--but Beam isn't in the same camp. I didn't realize how much of a big wheel Edmund Wilson was until I read this. Ultimately, it's a story about a friendship broken because of disagreements not over politics or adultery or money--but quarrels about Russian prosody. If you like Nabokov, this is worth a read.

When Joseph Smith was murdered by a mob at a jail in 1844, it might not have qualified as a literal crucifixion, but it took on that mantle figuratively. These days, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) is approaching mainstream; then, it was a disturbing threat to the status quo.

Alex Beam uses a journalist’s precision to make the case that any new religion would have produced that sort of reaction in the U.S. of the time, but that Smith’s new doctrine of polygamy was show more the final push needed to crystallize persecution of Mormons.

It’s possible to argue—as many historians have—that the LDS were simply the most extreme among many new religious movements of the time (think Adventism and Christian Science, which also have their roots in the period). But he makes a good case for those—also now relatively mainstream—groups also being viewed with suspicion, as well as a good case for the doctrine of polygamy being the match that lit the fuse.

Beam is impartial enough that he’s likely to upset both members of the LDS and their critics, some of whom are only slightly less rabid than the folks in Nauvoo and Carthage; to those of us interested in history, that’s a good indicator of the value of this book.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: http://litrant.tumblr.com/post/87481796931/the-second-salvation-american-crucifi... show less