Alex Beam

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

This is an interesting, fairly straightforward narrative look at the events which led up to the murder of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. Alex Beam is clearly sceptical of claims that Smith was "Prophet, Priest, and King of the World" (as, to be clear, am I), but I found his account to be even-handed. Reading this in the 2020s, what I found most interesting was how easily—and how ferociously—people became invested both in the Mormon faith and in opposition to it.

A breezy if somewhat glib introduction to the emergence of "Great Books" courses at elite American higher education institutions like Columbia and the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century and the subsequent, dubiously successful attempts at democratising them. Alex Beam gives a decent introduction to the two curious figures who were the key drivers behind the movement: Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins. Sadly, Beam's failure to really grapple with the underlying show more issues of these Great Books courses—the assumptions about race, class, gender, and "greatness" which drove them; why it is that they seem to have flourished almost uniquely in the United States—means that this would have probably made for a better New Yorker article than a book in its own right.

If Beam had wanted to—and you'll forgive me, I trust—write a great book in his own right, he would have needed to double its length. Doing so would have let him really get to grips with what he (let alone Adler and Hutchins) meant by a great (or Great) book and by Western civilisation, discuss how the Great Books movement has intersected with the politicisation of education, and seriously engage with the critiques of feminists and scholars of colour (Beam pays lip service to such critiques but then often comes out with lines like "The culture wars of the 1980s effectively buried the Great Books in a blizzard of anti-Establishment, multicultural rhetoric."). It might also have given Beam more space to unpack his sneering at "middlebrow" culture and repeated, but never explained, conflation of "works produced by people who aren't white men" with "second-rate literature." show less

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