On Saturday, June 13th, I was excited to participate in the annual day-long Long Island Great Books Council Spring Institute. About 40 "great bookies" convened in Garden City for two discussion tracks, one on the subject of "Money," the other on "Love."
The "Love" track discussed the stories of Grace Paley, the "Money" track Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money: a Financial History of the World and Jerry Sterner's play "Other People's Money".
I joined the "Money" group, led by a thirty-year veteran of Great Books discussion groups. Mary launched the discussion with three guidelines, "Please stick to the question at hand, don't talk over one another, and please listen carefully to each other." I could tell Mary was a stickler about the "Shared Inquiry" discussion technique, and had honed her skills as a leader over many years. Her interest lay solely in helping us to understand better the ideas in the texts.
Perhaps you notice that the books under discussion were not part of the "Great Books" canon. At the end of our discussion of "Other People's Money," however, Grahme Fischer, the President of the Long Island Great Books Council (and leader of a Great Books group at the Commack Public Library), posed the question, "Do you think this is a great book?" The consenus was no, although Sterner's comedy about a corporate raider with a "Mom and Pop" New England cable and wire company in his sights does raise a lot of questions about the U.S. financial system. Grahme then averred that sometimes less lofty works stimulate more spirited discussions. (Maybe ones that are too perfectly beautiful leave us speechless!)
I was pleased to discover there are still a lot of serious readers out there who have chosen to affiliate themselves with the loosely organized network of Great Books Councils around the country. Upcoming events include the 53rd Annual Wachs Great Books Summer Institute on the "Art of War" at Colby College in Maine the week of August 2-8 (contact Tom Beam at agreatbook@aol.com) and the Philadelphia council's Fall Institute weekend on the "Aesthetic Dialogue" in the Poconos the weekend of November 6-7 (contact John Dalton at JD5258875@aol.com)
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