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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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