ENGLISH

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

By Alex Beam

Book information

Publisher
PublicAffairs
Year
2008
ISBN
1586484877, 9781586484873, 9780786726981
LCC
E169.12 .B333 2008
Open Library ID
OL17072903M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
2 MB (2069872 bytes)
Edition
illustrated edition
Pages
257\257
Topic
History
Library
avaxhome.ws
Orientation
no
Scanned
no
Time added
2010-05-31 15:29:46

Description

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?

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