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chicagotribune.com >> Local news
Great Books still alive and kicking
Reports of fewer readers have not thwarted the foundation's mission to encourage deep thinking among its 15,000 participants in the United States
By Jon Anderson
Tribune staff reporter
Published August 26, 2004
"We're still here--and we're here to stay," Daniel Born said Friday, making a ringing stand in support of thoughtful magazines and books that are good or, even better, great. Indeed, he added, that is what the Great Books Foundation is all about.
Was. Is. Always will be.
Born is the editor of The Common Review, one of the foundation's newest efforts to reach out to those who want to "think and share ideas."
It's a cause that has been ongoing since 1947, when philosopher Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins, then president of the University of Chicago, launched the Great Books program, an idea that emphasized "shared inquiry" into the classics, rather than lecturers and students.
Adler made the cover of Time magazine and the skits of the Second City cabaret, where he was described as "The Great Bookie."
By the 1960s, hundreds of discussion groups had sprung up across the country, following the Great Books theme: that classics of Western literature held the key to the human condition and that personal benefits accrued from pondering the definitions of such concepts as justice, liberty and beauty.
Both Adler and Hutchins have passed on. In turn, the foundation has changed, Born said.
"Yes, people do still associate us with dead, white males," he admitted, referring to a common criticism of the initial Great Books reading list, which ran from ancient Greek philosophers to Sigmund Freud. "We are still committed to the classics," he added, "but we are very much into quality reading of all sorts."
As others have suggested, these are not the best of times for quality reading.
Last month, a study by the National Endowment for the Arts reported on a survey of 17,000 adults who were asked if, during the previous 12 months, they had read any novels, short stories, poetry or plays in their leisure time that were not required for work or school. Even a few pages of a Harlequin romance.
Fewer than 50 percent said they had done any leisure reading at all, a percentage that is shrinking fast.
"It's not like we're in an apocalyptic situation," Born said. "In fact, a lot of people are still reading. We'd like to help them think more deeply about issues."
Nor does he think print will ever die out. "People like to hold a book--or a magazine--in their hands," he said. "You can take them to the beach, without a power supply. And if one falls in your bathtub, it's not as serious as if you drop your laptop in there."
These days, the Great Books Foundation, which has a Web site www.greatbooks.org, oversees 860 discussion groups in the U.S., with about 15,000 regular participants. Each group member now receives a copy of The Common Review, a quarterly also available in some 400 bookstores.
"Our aim," Born said, "is to become an important magazine of books and ideas. We want to bridge the mainstream and the ivory tower."
The 10th issue, due out shortly, will tackle themes ranging from "How the Culture of Celebrity Erodes Thought" to "An Alternative to Preventive War."
Both should be springboards for discussion at Great Books groups, where the No. 1 rule is to keep conversation focused. "Too often, book clubs drift off into personal chatter," Born noted. With modern-day Great Bookies, he added, "you don't talk about your dog's root canal."
Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune
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