[MD] Great Books...

[MarshaV]

This may be of interest.  Ignore it if it isn't.

Book:  A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious 
Afterlife of the Great Books (Hardcover)

 From Publishers Weekly
Before the dawn of the television age, in an ambitious effort to 
enlighten the masses via door-to-door sales, Encyclopedia Britannica 
and the University of Chicago launched the Great Books of Western 
Civilization, "all fifty-four volumes of them... purporting to 
encompass all of Western knowledge from Homer to Freud." Led by the 
"intellectual Mutt 'n' Jeff act" of former University of Chicago 
president Robert Hutchins and his sidekick Mortimer Adler, the Great 
Books briefly, and improbably, caught the nation's imagination. In 
his discussion, Boston Globe columnist Beam looks at how and why this 
multi-year project took shape, what it managed to accomplish (or 
not), and the lasting effects it had on college curricula (in the 
familiar form of Dead White Males). 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.


http://www.amazon.com/Great-Idea-Time-Curious-Afterlife/dp/1586484877/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232037930&sr=1-1 









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The Universe is uncaused, like a net of jewels in which each is a 
reflection of all the others in a fantastic, interrelated harmony without end.
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