A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (Hardcover) by Alex Beam

from coolmama

Alex Beam writes an exploration of how the "Great Books" came into being. The Great Books mean many things: the series, published by University of Chicago; the open to the public and literary salons in the 1940s onward, as well as the university cirriculum (which was spearheaded at Columbia). How...

from kristenn

I picked this up in part because I thought I owned (but had never read) the full set of Great Books, but it turns out I have the competition (Harvard Shelf) instead. But the reasons people both create and buy these sorts of definitive collections remained interesting. There is certainly the risk ...

from

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 provi...

from Sullywriter

A surprisingly engrossing and enjoyable book. Adler and Hutchins were quite the oddballs but fascinating characters with some very intriguing ideas about education.

from pbadeer

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 "Gre...