An engaging personal examination of a phenomenon that merits more scholarly attention.
Boston Globe columnist Beam (Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital, 2001, etc.) takes a witty look at the publishing program that aimed to bring high culture to the masses…or at least the aspiring middle class.
Launched with great fanfare in 1952, the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World, a joint project of the University of Chicago and Encyclopedia Britannica, enjoyed a decade-plus of popularity, then slowly declined in sales through the ’70s and ’80s. A disastrous relaunch in 1990 left Britannica with unsold inventory it now makes little attempt to peddle. Beam begins by sketching the origins of the core-curriculum movement, describing Great Books precursor Harvard Classics and tracking the careers and unlikely alliance of the program’s Founding Fathers: Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, a tall, handsome, compelling personality; and Mortimer Adler, a short, combative, off-putting pedant who was the Great Books’ most tireless advocate. It was wealthy ad man William Benton, Hutchins’s friend, who actually had the idea to publish the Great Books in a uniform edition, Beam notes, although later both Hutchins and Adler claimed credit. The author takes us through the fundraising, the knotty debates about which texts to include, the advertising, the launch, the disappointing first few years and the revisions of the marketing strategy that eventually led to total sales of a million sets. He notes that the page design (double columns of tiny type) made the books unreadable, the failure to include footnotes and annotations made them difficult to comprehend and at $250 per set in 1952 they weren’t exactly cheap. But for a while the Great Books sagged bookshelves in homes across the land, before television and multiculturalism, among other factors, did them in. Today, they claim a cult following. As part of his research, Beam visited college campuses where the Great Books retain their prominence, and attended weekend retreats of Great Books groupies.
An engaging personal examination of a phenomenon that merits more scholarly attention.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58648-487-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
PROFILES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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