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VII, 245 p., ill. From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - Jacket minimally rubbed, allover very good copy. Signed by author. / Umschlag minimal berieben, insgesamt sehr guter Zustand. Mit Autorensignatur. - Today the classic works of literature known as the Western canon are cannon fodder in the culture wars, but from the late 1940s through the 1960s they were a runaway popculture phenomenon. Americans met in classrooms and with discussion groups nationwide to tackle the Great Books of the Western World, a fifty-four volume series developed by a group of ambitious intellectuals at the University of Chicago. The series included 443 works by seventy-four dead, white, male authors and, supposedly, embraced all of the important ideas of Western civilization. The editor of the Great Books, motor-mouthed Mortimer Adler, plugged them relentlessly in the newspapers and on radio and TV Time magazine even featured the Great Books on their cover and (improbably) suggested that the excited salesmanship of the Great Books had switched many Americansat least temporarilyfrom the works of Spillane to those of Spinoza and St. Augustine. And then, one day, the fad was over; the Great Books were derided as racist, imperialist, and dangerously right-wing. A Great Idea at the Time is Alex Beams witty, informative history of the creation and cultural reign of the oft-quoted, least-read books of our time, or any other. The Great Books started as an educational movement, evolved into a successful marketing idea, and live on as an intriguing bibelot in the curiosity shop of intellectual history. Why did a million American households buy books by Hippocrates, Galen, and Nicomachus from door-to-door salesmen? How and why did the Great Books fall out of fashion? Populated with amusing and memorable characters including Adler, Robert M. Hutchins, William Benton, Saul Bellow, Gertrude Stein, Mark Van Doren, and others, A Great Idea at the Time is an entertaining and strangely poignant portrait of American popular culture on the threshold of the television age. It will leave readers asking themselves: Have I read Lucretiuss De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not? - Alex Beam is a columnist for the Boston Globe and the author of three books: two novels about Russia, Fellow Travelers and The American Are Coming!, and a nonfiction book, Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside Americas Premier Mental Hospital. Gracefully Insane won a Massachusetts Book Award and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2002. The recipient of many journalism awards, Beam has written for the International Herald Tribune, the New York Times, Slate, the Atlantic, and many other magazines. He lives in Boston. Sprache: Englisch Gewicht in Gramm: 550 Original hardcover with dust jacket.
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