A Great Idea at the Time

by Beam, Alex

• ISBN13: 9781586484873
• ISBN10: 1586484877
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-03
• Publisher: Public Affairs

Summary

"A Great Idea at the Time is Alex Beam's 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, 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 Lucretius's De Rerum Natura lately? If not, why not?"--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

Alex Beam is an award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe. His writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, Slate, the New York Times and many other magazines. The author of Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America’s Premier Mental Hospital, and of two novels, he lives in Boston.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Headwaters	p. 7
The Odd Couple	p. 23
The Great Books in the Gray City	p. 37
Great Books Good for You!	p. 57
The Making of the Books	p. 75
Faster, Pussycat! Sell! Sell!	p. 95
Second Verse Not the Same as the First	p. 117
The People of the Book	p. 135
Epictetus at the Cash Register: Chicago and Columbia	p. 151
Hard Core: St. John's College	p. 165
Among the Bookies	p. 181
Dead Books Walking	p. 191
Acknowledgments	p. 203
The (Randomly Annotated) Great Books of the Western World	p. 207
Notes on Sources	p. 223
Index	p. 229
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.