Great Books - by Michael Gose (Paperback)

About the Book

This book explores the benefits of reading "Great Books," and is virtually unique in detailing what a series of Great Books classes has looked like over the past decades.

Book Synopsis

Just over 100 years ago Columbia's John Erskine started a General Honors program that was the precursor of the Great Books programs popularized by his student, Mortimer Adler. As a set term "Great Books" has elicited more than some controversy, especially because most relatively short lists of such works mostly features "dead white men". However, most any group in America has made the Great Ideas their own. This book explores the benefits of reading "Great Books," and is virtually unique in detailing what a series of Great Books classes has looked like over the past decades.

Review Quotes

"A comprehensive and lively guidebook to the Great Books that will benefit intellectual adventurers young and old. Gose invites readers to seek truth and beauty through an ascent into the masterworks of the past, providing instructions and advice for the journey with the wit and insight of a master teacher." --Shilo Brooks, Ph.D., Assistant Director, James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, lecturer in politics, Princeton University

"What's so great about the great books? They bring us into conversations with great thinkers and ideas, teaches reading, analysis, conversation and writing. The program lays a liberal arts foundation for the very best college education. One of the best things we did when I was president of Pepperdine University was to encourage Michael Gose and his colleagues to begin a Great Books program for the first two years of the undergraduate experience. The only thing better would have been to require every student to take it. Following the lead of the great Robert Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago, one of the best things a college president can do is start and support a Great Books program. The model is out there, it only takes excellent teachers, like Michael Gose, and community support to accomplish it." --David Davenport, Research Fellow Emeritus, Hoover Institution, Stanford, California

"Michael Gose was my Great Books professor. He helped me navigate the great conversation. Now he's poured his wisdom from forty years of teaching Great Books into one place. Great Books: Everyone's Inheritance should be given to every novice and veteran teacher of the Great Books so that they may learn or remember how to continue the tradition that was started not merely by Erskin and Adler in the twentieth century but began with Homer, Plato and Aristotle millennia ago." --Jessica Hooten Wilson, Seaver College Scholar of Liberal Arts, Pepperdine University, author of "The Scandal of Holiness"

"Michael Gose rightly recognizes the importance The Great Ideas have for studying and understanding The Great Books, the society we live in, and the everyday challenges of the family. Mortimer Adler and Max Weismann were delighted that Gose continued their work at Pepperdine University." --Elaine Weismann, president of The Center for the Study of The Great Ideas

"The Great Books concept, designed by Erskine and Adler and practiced by Gose for more than 37 years, can provide an academic foundation for any student during the last two years of high school or the first two years of college. Gose begins his book with a brief history of the Great Books idea and crafts the other chapters around curriculum, issues and controversies, conflicts and benefits, limitations and potential downsides, and assumptions. He concludes with a plea to place the Great Books in the curriculum. The book has many notable facets: Gose's 75-word preface for the study of Great Books, Gose's embrace of both chronological and a historical approaches to this literature, four possible Great Books lists, and an excellent appendix to determine whether a student is prepared for Great Books study. This book is for both individuals interested in creating a Great Books curriculum or for those who are already ensconced in the practice. Highly recommended. Faculty and professionals." --Choice Reviews

About the Author

Michael Gose was a student at Mission Bay High School, Occidental College, Pepperdine University, Stanford University, and as such, he had the great good fortune of reading and discussing the classics. After a visit to campus by Mortimer Adler, Gose initiated a Great Books program at Pepperdine University, and has been teaching Great Books, and writing about Socratic pedagogy, for almost forty years.