Book summary

With breezy wit and literary charm Alex Beam recounts the rise and fall of the "Great Books of the Western World" project, a set of 54 black tomes intended to contain the finest writing and philosophy of Western civilization. Marshaled by Robert Hutchinson and Mortimer Adler, the "Great Books" series went into action in the 1950s with the intention of bringing the words of Aristotle, Shakespeare, Dickens, Darwin, and others into the family home. Meant to be a literary canon for the ages, the project eventually foundered against the countercultural consciousness of the 1960s and beyond. Beam's A GREAT IDEA AT THE TIME skillfully renders the "Great Books" project as the zenith of an earnest yet foolhardy concept of literature as a monolithic and unstoppable progression of knowledge, moving smoothly from antiquity into the future. Selected by the New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2008.

Media reviews

"Beam skillfully animates the lives of the academics involved in the venture and provides a brutally funny account of the editorial decisions about which authors to include...."

  "The subtitle should have read, Every Negative Fact and Innuendo I Could Dredge Up



Although he was not particularly unkind to me in the book, I found virtually every page to be a smart-alecky and snide diatribe of the worst order against the Great Books, Adler, Hutchins, et al. Plus the book is replete with errors of commission and omission.



As an effective antidote, I prescribe Robert Hutchins' pithy essay, The Great Conversation.



If the Great Books crusade is as bleak as Beam purports, then happily, not many will read his invective book.



Max Weismann,

President and co-founder with Mortimer Adler, Center for the Study of The Great Ideas

Chairman, The Great Books Academy"

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