A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books

First, this review will add little to those already contributed here by Mike Leone, Barry Brodsky, and many others. I agree with Leone that one must read beneath the surface to appreciate A Great Idea at the Time (GIAT). If you've never before encountered GBWW you won't "get" GIAT. However, if you are one of millions like me who fell under their spell you will probably find relief in GIAT as a much-needed "dust jacket" to GBWW. I did. As a graduate student in the 1980s I stumbled one day in our university library upon GBWW and was taken by its ambitious plan encompassing all of the Great Books I had studied and many more. I had come to believe mastery of a single Great Book might be accomplished only with years of effort by a talented scholar; now this 1950s encyclopedia claimed to provide mastery of the entire Western Canon to all comers. I found the claim incredible at the time, and many scholars still think it preposterous. Yet Hutchins' The Great Conversation (GBWW v.1, 1952) is even now a credible response critics of GBWW, and I have yet not to enjoy a chapter of Adler's Syntopicon. As a graduate student I had apparently fallen victim to the elitism which as Alex Beam explains had eclipsed the GB movement by the 1980s. Hutchins and Adler's program was of populist roots stemming from John Dewey; my training was rooted in the later Straussian era (as Beam explains on p. 193, Hutchins himself brought Leo Strauss to U of C). Whether the GB program was only a "great idea at the time" or a timeless treasure remains to be seen, but the answer to this question may foretell the future of the American democratic experiment. And whether Hutchins and Adler (and the era they represented) were hopelessly idealistic or profoundly prescient in their dream of a liberal education for all may still be the most significant question for the West. Has Beam made a scholarly contribution to this dialogue? No, but as other reviewers have shown this was not his aim (though I think GIAT well-researched and indexed). Will those unacquainted with GIAT find this book compelling? I doubt it. But if you have fallen under the spell of Great Books programs, GBWW, or even Straussians, I think you will be enlightened, entertained, and encouraged by Beam's account of the human side of the story. And as a good dust jacket can, GIAT may even provide the perspective you need to tackle GBWW for the first time, or to return to them. It has for me.

Briefly, if you're curious about the subject matter, you will love reading this book. The "Great Books" idea had a wide reach. Even at MIT, in the sixties we were all required to take 21.01 and 21.02 "INT HUMANITIES" and 21.03 and 21.04 "MOD WEST IDEAS AND VAL," along with 5.01 Chemistry and 8.01 Physics. The subject matter is important in the context of politics and the "culture wars." My own curiosity led me at one point to an interest in the Great Books crowd--Stringfellow Barr, Scott Buchanan, Mortimer Adler, Robert Hutchins, John Erskine, Alexander Meiklejohn, and specifically, Barr and Buchanan's failed attempt to found a Great-Books-based college in Massachusetts at Stockbridge. What's interesting to me is that most of those guys were lefties, or at least Henry-Wallace-type "One-Worlders," constantly on the verge of getting in political trouble during the McCarthy era--and now the Great Books seem to have been captured by the political rIght who like the authoritarianism aspects of selecting a canon. I wish, though, that Beam had addressed the strange phoniness of producing the books _in a set_. That to me is the hallmark of intellectual dishonesty in this enterprise. I'm sure it was fun for those guys to select them--Beam reproduces some wonderful notes they exchanged arguing about which books should be In and which should be Out. I guess the idea was to treat it as a systematic program of study. But can you imagine any college, even St. John's, say "Oh, great, let's adopt these as our textbooks?" Anyone embarking on self-study would be far better served by obtaining individual copies of individual books one at a time, and letting their curiosity lead them to the next one. Just because you want to own Sterne's _Tristram Shandy_ doesn't automatically mean you want to own Apollonius' _On Conic Sections_. A much more honest enterprise, and I suspect much more effective in producing editions that actually got read, was the paperback revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Signet Classics. Dover Publications. Penguin Classics. And (not paper) the Modern Library. All producing very inexpensive editions of "classics" as individual titles. Those are what really got used in classrooms. (Can you believe I was naive enough to assume at one point that "The Harvard Classics" were actually used at Harvard?) Alex Beam put in a lot of time and legwork, attending Great Books sessions, visiting St. John's College, and even reading the books. He answers many questions I had about what these people were like and what they thought they were doing. I loved his profile of St. John's and its students; I've long been curious about that college. By the way, how times change. if Wikipedia is the new "Encyclopaedia Britannica," then Project Gutenberg is the new "Great Books of the Western World."

What a great book! During my own undergraduate years as a Liberal Arts major, I wondered why some of the dreary tomes assigned in class seemed so random, so subjective, and sometimes, so irrelevant. I was fascinated reading Beam's account of the evolution of the undergraduate curriculum, from memorization of passages in Greek, etc., to the randomness of electives, and then to the sway of the Great Books curriculum, so compellingly described in this terrific book. Even more delicious, the author spins a timeless story of the curse of ego in the creation of most great things. Everything your mother said about how smart people can do dumb things is in this gripping account of "the excited salesmanship" of the Great Books, and of Adler and Benton, two towering intellects with feet of clay. Beam's sharp wit and careful detail bring the story alive. You feel you know his characters, and most certainly recognize their doppelgangers in your present life. I wish I'd been assigned this book before I'd enrolled in Philosophy I or Freshman English. "A Great Idea at the Time" will bring great perspective to many.

Alex Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe, found himself intrigued by something new and did something many of us wish we could do: he researched the subject and wrote a book about it. As any reader of his newspaper columns knows, the author is (all at the same time) erudite, opinionated, occasionally scathing, and often laugh-out-loud funny. In "A Great Idea at the Time," Beam gives all of these qualities a good workout. Many of the Great Books that were promoted as essential reading (for everyone from Joe the Plumber to students at the University of Chicago) are tough sledding, to say the least. By contrast, Beam (as he states in his Introduction) set out to write "a brief, engaging, and undidactic history of the Great Books. A book as different from the ponderous and forbidding Great Books as it could possibly be." In this, he has certainly succeeded. In an era of dinosaur-sized tomes about pretty much everything, Beam has the wit to say his piece in 200 pages. He seems to have done the heavy lifting of reading countless letters, biographies, etc., so that we don't have to - and the result is the more compelling and intimate for it. I'll admit that I was a bit hesitant about the subject matter. After all, the curriculum of "dead white males" has, mostly, fallen out of fashion; therefore, why read about the efforts of other (now-) dead white males to promote it? The answer, of course, is that the journey is more important than the destination. Think books like Simon Winchester's "The Professor and the Madman" - you may not have been desperate to learn about Victorian loony bins or big dictionaries with eye-ruining small type; but once you bought the ticket, you really enjoyed the ride. Here, the same rule applies. Beam's eye for the telling detail, his schizophrenic habit of laying bare the foibles of his subjects while never losing his affection for them, and his don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-it verbal acuity guarantee a great read. (And don't make the mistake of skipping Beam's annotated list of the Great Books at the end of the text - it would be like walking out of "There's Something About Mary" before the credits come on.) Now - I have to make a comment about some of the other reviews that have been posted, although usually I don't find doing so to be a productive exercise. There is one gentleman, who actually appears in the book, who is unhappy because, while the author was not unkind to him, he was "smart-alecky and snide" toward the worthies behind the Great Books movement. Well, as noted, Beam often is opinionated and even scathing; for the typical reader, though, this means that "A Great Idea at the Time" is fun to read and far more than a dry recitation of facts. This reviewer has his own axe to grind, and grind it he may; but the one-star rating is less a review of the book and more a display of the axe. Another couple of reviewers seem to think that Beam set out to write some kind of definitive academic history of a social and l