A Great Idea at the Time
The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books
By Alex Beam
(PublicAffairs, Hardcover, 9781586484873, 256pp.)
Publication Date: November 2008
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback, Paperback
Categories: Books & Reading, Social History, United States - 20th Century (1945 to 2000)
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Today the classics of the western canon, written by the proverbial “dead white men,” are cannon fodder in the culture wars. But in the 1950s and 1960s, they were a pop culture phenomenon. The Great Books of Western Civilization, fifty-four volumes chosen by intellectuals at the University of Chicago, began as an educational movement, and evolved into a successful marketing idea. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? And how and why did the great books fall out of fashion?
In A Great Idea at the Time Alex Beam explores the Great Books mania, in an entertaining and strangely poignant portrait of American popular culture on the threshold of the television age. Populated with memorable characters, A Great Idea at the Time will leave readers asking themselves: Have I read Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not?
Alex Beam is an award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe. His writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, Slate, the New York Times and many other magazines. The author of Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America’s Premier Mental Hospital, and of two novels, he lives in Boston.
Britannica Blog, December 9, 2008
“Marvelously entertaining”
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