It Was A Dirty Job
But someone had to do it.* One of my favorite Globies, iconclastic freethinker Alex Beam, has a book out and a signing upcoming in Cambridge. “A Great Idea At The Time” is the history of the Great Books series and the debates that went into choosing them, “all fifty-four volumes of them… purporting to encompass all of Western knowledge from Homer to Freud.” The task fell to …
“the ‘intellectual Mutt ‘n’ Jeff act’” of former University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins and his sidekick Mortimer Adler … Beam (Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America’s Premier Mental Hospital) describes meetings endured by the selection committee, and countless debates over Euripedes, Herodotus, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens and Whitman (”When it comes to Great Books, no one is without an opinion.”), but tells it like it is regarding the Syntopicon they devised-at “3,000 subtopics and 163,000 separate entries, not exactly a user-friendly compendium”-and the resulting volumes, labeling them “icons of unreadability-32,000 pages of tiny, double-column, eye-straining type.” By lauding the intent and intelligently critiquing the outcome, Beam offers an insightful, accessible and fair narrative on the Great Books, its time, and its surprisingly significant legacy.
The above from Publisher’s Weekly. Sounds like good pointy-headed fun. Beam taps a clever keyboard and is much admired (by me) for his abiding interest in and deep knowledge of all kinds of largely worthless arcanery. He especially enjoys pissing matches about the kind of stuff only a handful of the most committed zealots, devoted acolytes, and nerdy enthusiasts could possibly care about.
Reading Dec. 4, 7 p.m., Harvard Book Store. I’d go, Alex, but I’m afraid I’ll be tied up assisting my newspaper in kicking your newspaper’s ass again.
… Damn, now I’ve jinxed it.
* I’m not sure now that I think about it if I mean Alex’s research and writing of this book or the subject matter itself. Both, I guess.
Topics: Boston, literary, media
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:55 pm on Wednesday, November 5, 2008
4 Responses to “It Was A Dirty Job”
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November 6th, 2008 at 1:06 am
The Great Books of the Western World? In 1963 my father bought the set and I used to sit in the back of grammar class and read them. This caused me to be recycled to remedial English. The vaunted California school system ever at the vanguard of education. BTW, remedial English bounced me back to the original class. The ignominy of it all.
November 6th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
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
November 6th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Gosh … smart-alecky and snide? How unlike Alex.
November 6th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
We bought the Great Books set, circa 1970s, and discovered the foundation of the education of our Founding Fathers. True, much is outdated (the Aristotle, Euclide, and Freud books specifically), but I personally discovered Marcus Aurelius (gloomy as he is) and the complete works of Shakespeare, which I could not get in college.
The series may not mean a lot to the current generation, unfamiliar with the densely twisted vagaries of the English language, but it meant a certain stretching of the mind to me.