As a counterbalance to my last post (on the often cynical new book Great Idea at the Time), I would like to share with you a gleaning from the little book A Key to Culture : Introductory Reading from the Great Books Course, by one Francis Neilson. I came across this book during a recent visit to the library at my son's college in Ohio.
A Key to Culture was published in 1948 by the C. C. Nelson Company of Appleton, Wisconsin. Neilson intended it as a bibliography of readings to help his audience to learn more about the historical backdrop of the Great Books.
"Over a period of half a century, much of my time has been given to the classics and I still want many more years to satisfy my hunger for them," he writes. He advises his readers to become adept at the "art of making time" for the Great Books, and recommends a rigorous discipline of devoting two hours a day, three days a week to their study.
Neilson considers his book an adjunct to "the Hutchins Project." There's an ingenuousness to Neilson's book, long out of print I'm sure, that I've found nowhere else in my own reading about this cultural movement.
Happy New Year!
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Monday, December 8, 2008
A great book about Great Books
Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam recently published a popular book on the great books movement in 20th-century America entitled A Great Idea at the Time.
Beam entertainingly traces the movement's story its two-fold guise as both a college-curriculum reform and an adult self-education initiative. The book begins with accounts of the efforts of some early European advocates of the sustained study of the classics: Frederic William Farrar, Auguste Comte, John Lubbock. Lubbock published a list in a popular magazine of the 100 greatest books ever written, and was the forebear of subsequent efforts to delimit "best of the best" that have continued to this day. Beam also profiles leading exponents in the United States: Charles Eliot, John Erskine, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and Mortimer Adler.
The heart of A Great Idea at the Time concerns the heyday of the Great Books in America in the 1950s and 60s that coincided with the publication by the University of Chicago and the Encyclopaedia Britannica of the multivolume Great Books of the Western World. A key figure during this period was William Benton, the Chicago ad man who brought his business acumen to the project. The set sold like gangbusters, though Beam considers the biggest selling point of the set -- which included not only great works of literature, philosophy, and history, but also key texts in science and medicine such as Ptolemy's Almagest and Harvey's On the Circulation of the Blood -- to have been anxiety among middle-class Americans that the growth in their intellectual stature had not kept pace with that of their material well-being.
Beam does his homework. He travels to Annapolis to visit St. John's College, whose "all great books, all the time" curriculum was initiated by two of Hutchins's protégés, and to Chicago, still home to the Great Books Foundation. His description of campus movements of the 1990s to overthrow the legacy of DWMs (dead-white males) forms another important chapter of the saga. At the end of the book he offers a humorous annotated bibliography of works that have made the "canon" over the years.
My one critique of A Great Idea at the Time is that it's hard to discern Beam's real point-of-view regarding the classics. The subtitle: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books is misleading in this regard, because Beam's account is by-and-large more sympathetic, but I'll refrain from spoiling the ending for you. Let's just say that Beam might identify with his hypothetical undergraduate student sitting in the library, his assigned inscrutable though undeniably "great" tome in his lap, gazing out the window onto the quad and wishing he were playing frisbee with his buddies instead. At times all we great bookies do.
Find A Great Idea at the Time in our collection by clicking here.
Beam entertainingly traces the movement's story its two-fold guise as both a college-curriculum reform and an adult self-education initiative. The book begins with accounts of the efforts of some early European advocates of the sustained study of the classics: Frederic William Farrar, Auguste Comte, John Lubbock. Lubbock published a list in a popular magazine of the 100 greatest books ever written, and was the forebear of subsequent efforts to delimit "best of the best" that have continued to this day. Beam also profiles leading exponents in the United States: Charles Eliot, John Erskine, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and Mortimer Adler.
The heart of A Great Idea at the Time concerns the heyday of the Great Books in America in the 1950s and 60s that coincided with the publication by the University of Chicago and the Encyclopaedia Britannica of the multivolume Great Books of the Western World. A key figure during this period was William Benton, the Chicago ad man who brought his business acumen to the project. The set sold like gangbusters, though Beam considers the biggest selling point of the set -- which included not only great works of literature, philosophy, and history, but also key texts in science and medicine such as Ptolemy's Almagest and Harvey's On the Circulation of the Blood -- to have been anxiety among middle-class Americans that the growth in their intellectual stature had not kept pace with that of their material well-being.
Beam does his homework. He travels to Annapolis to visit St. John's College, whose "all great books, all the time" curriculum was initiated by two of Hutchins's protégés, and to Chicago, still home to the Great Books Foundation. His description of campus movements of the 1990s to overthrow the legacy of DWMs (dead-white males) forms another important chapter of the saga. At the end of the book he offers a humorous annotated bibliography of works that have made the "canon" over the years.
My one critique of A Great Idea at the Time is that it's hard to discern Beam's real point-of-view regarding the classics. The subtitle: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books is misleading in this regard, because Beam's account is by-and-large more sympathetic, but I'll refrain from spoiling the ending for you. Let's just say that Beam might identify with his hypothetical undergraduate student sitting in the library, his assigned inscrutable though undeniably "great" tome in his lap, gazing out the window onto the quad and wishing he were playing frisbee with his buddies instead. At times all we great bookies do.
Find A Great Idea at the Time in our collection by clicking here.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Next Meeting: "The Prince," by Machiavelli, Monday, January 26th 7 p.m.
The group's next meeting takes place on Monday, January 26th, 2009, in the Main Library Auditorium. The reading will be selections from The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli, which some commentators consider the most misunderstood book ever written. Please note there is no meeting in December (winter break!!!).
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