Book Review - A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam

Growing up with the Great Books of the Western World at my fingertips, I was very interested in reading this book. I read a review by Adrienne at Bookmark My Heart who shared that the author was not very kind toward his subject. I endeavored to read the book with an open mind and come to my own conclusions.

The Great Books of the Western World is a set of 54 volumes which contains the classical works of authors like Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Melville, Marx and Goethe. The first set published contained no works written by women or minorities. The sets were sold through advertisements and by door to door salesmen. My grandparents owned a set that held a place of honor on two of the six built-in bookshelves in their dining room. From the time I was very young, I was attracted to those books, I believe because of the brightly colored spines. Once I could read, I began to memorize the names, not realizing until I was much older that I mispronounced a good number of them. In high school, I began to take the books off the shelves and read bits and pieces, most of which I did not understand. By the end of high school, I was reading the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare and had borrowed War and Peace to read for my senior book report. Whether or not I read them, I loved those books and believe they were the seeds that grew into my love for the written word. So, yes, from the first snide remark made by Beam, to the last, I was on the defensive. I liken reading this book to crossing a minefield. As long as one can screen out the sarcastic commentary and foolish interpretations, there is a fascinating history behind the Great Books.

Publishing the set was an answer to a demand for the classics that were being read for classes and seminars (as well as great book groups) offered by the likes of Mortimer Adler, Robert Hutchins and John Erskine. Students and attendees had a difficult time getting their hands on the texts and the Great Books of the Western World was the solution. The main complaints of the Great Books were that they were written by dead, white, males; grievous omissions of other great works; the middle class not being smart enough to read and understand them; huckster-type sales methods used to oh-my-god make a buck in a capitalist society (sarcasm mine); and they were unreadable, very unreadable, and highly unreadable. (I do think that if I came across that adjective one more time I was going to deem this book unreadable.) Yes, the text was small. Yes, the pages were double-columned. Yes, it was a legitimate complaint. But to say it over and over and over was overkill.

There was a fascinating chapter on St. John's college (a large part of the book focused on the great books being part of college curriculum) and a touching portrait of a man named Thomas Hyland who, at the time of his death, had built a 63,000 volume personal library (for this alone, I thought the book was worth reading). The two men most responsible for the Great Books were Adler and Hutchins, and despite the ugly picture Beam painted of these two men, I chose to believe that they had created a good thing and held onto the fact that they did not see any barriers to who could or could not partake in the great works of Western civilization (as they and a small group of others defined it).

Beam writes, "Somehow, somewhere, someone drained the energy and fun out of the Great Books." I am sorry that has been Mr. Beam's experience and I am continually grateful it was not mine.