The high points are twofold: I feel notably more capable of conversation about the Greats now, perhaps even a tad more intelligent for having read this little volume. Also, the author is humanly and bluntly opinionated, much like my husband. If you are interested in literature I suggest the short time it takes to absorb this one. ( )

Entertaining enough ...

but it’s not one of the Great Books. Seriously, though, this was a competent romp through the history field the Treat Books of the Western World, as a teaching paradigm and a publishing program. He makes a solid case, especially that the great scientific works do not provide a great deal of contemporary value, as science only proceeds on the theories that can be disproven but have not been, rather than a tradition. (I expected him to point out that a key tension in the modern world has been the breaking of ties with Aristotelian traditions, allowing new discoveries that were contrary to Aristotle.

However, much of the book appears opposed to the idea that there can be a canon, however opened to include women and minorities. Yet, we know that “classics” such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication is the Rights of Women, Shakespeare’s King Lear, and Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, will continue to “teach and delight” readers. From my point of view, perhaps narrow, the failure of the Great Books of the Western World as a publishing project is paradoxically in its overselling of a too-expensive series and its lack of quality control in choosing the cheapest translations and typesetting the books for value, not readability. The author does call these out, in a great deal of detail.

He could point out a more successful program, that has a similar goal: The Library of America. This program avoided several of the pitfalls of the GBWW program. It does not assume that it has a comprehensive list of the best books. Instead, it attempts to provide “America’s greatest writing in authoritative new editions.” In many cases, the best scholarship has produced definitive editions, including content previously edited out. The books have comprehensive timelines of the authors and their times, providing a context that the GBWW volumes lack. The volumes are readable, have stay open spines, and have been more inclusive of women and minorities. These editions are sold by subscription, but also, and perhaps more commonly, as individual titles. Over time, many of the individual titles have been released in paperback, and these are only sold individually, not by subscription. The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade was the inspiration for this series, envisioned by Edmund Wilson and commencing publication in 1982, ten years after Wilson’s death, this publication has been running continuously and (it appears) successfully for 37 years. ( )

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 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." ( )

I am really enjoying this book. The author treats the principle characters, Hutchins and Adler, with respect but a lot of irony. I had a set - which remained mostly unread but a great source of quotations - and their tiny print and double-column layout of 443 all-white-male works reinforced one quip: "The Great Books were icons of unreadability."

Nevertheless, over a million sets were sold for hundreds of dollars each, at a time when hundreds of dollars was a lot more than today. By the seventies, sales had fallen off a cliff even after an attempt to make them more "relevant" by adding some women authors.

The book has all sorts of interesting tidbit about the evo9lution of our educational system. Hutchins and Adler, along with Dewy and Eliot really dragged Yale and Harvard kicking and screaming out of the 17th century mold of only Latin, Greek and Rhetoric classes, by introducing -- horror -- electives.

Only St. John's College force-feeds the Great Books' through all four years of its curriculum today. James Payn, now a forgotten novelist, said of the set "Here are the most admirable and varied materials for the formation of a prig." Perfect description of William Bennett.

Hutchins, and presumably Adler, believed that metaphysics should play the most important role in undergraduate education. He wrote in his book [b:The Higher Learning in America|1759124|The Higher Learning in America (Foundations of Higher Education)|Robert Maynard Hutchins|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1187828883s/1759124.jpg|1757028] that "the aim of higher education is wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge of principles and causes. Metaphysics deals with the highest principles and causes. Therefore metaphysics is the highest wisdom." Perhaps a weak logical string. Nevertheless, students could not gain this wisdom by sitting in class listening to teachers lecture, nor from textbooks. That became the great role for (sound the trumpets) THE GREAT BOOKS.

"Adler and Hutchins had transformed a technique of general education into a vision of salvation; they believed their Bildungsideal could save mankind and the modern world from moral decay and physical destruction.... The Great Books movement, in short, offered an intellectual surrogate for, or supplement to, attendance in church.


Interesting review in NYTimes Book Review Nov 16, 2008

Christian Science Monitor review at http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2008/11/20/a-great-idea-at-the-time/ ( )

Although I imagined this to be a consideration of the canon in a general sense, it's actually the story behind the Great Books of the Western World collection, 54 volumes developed by a panel at the University of Chicago in the '40s.

The behind-the-scenes chatter about what should be included/excluded was my favourite part, although I think I'd've enjoyed it even more if the set had been a presence in my own life. (Or, for that matter, if I'd read more of the series' selections, as I've only read Machiavelli's The Prince, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Montaigne's Essays, Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Tolstoy's War and Peace, and portions of other sections but not, for instance, the entirety of Shakespeare's oeuvre.)