This may be of interest. Ignore it if it isn't.
Book: A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious
Afterlife of the Great Books (Hardcover)
From Publishers Weekly
Before the dawn of the television age, in an ambitious effort to
enlighten the masses via door-to-door sales, Encyclopedia Britannica
and the University of Chicago launched the Great Books of Western
Civilization, "all fifty-four volumes of them... purporting to
encompass all of Western knowledge from Homer to Freud." Led by the
"intellectual Mutt 'n' Jeff act" of former University of Chicago
president Robert Hutchins and his sidekick Mortimer Adler, the Great
Books briefly, and improbably, caught the nation's imagination. In
his discussion, Boston Globe columnist Beam looks at how and why this
multi-year project took shape, what it managed to accomplish (or
not), and the lasting effects it had on college curricula (in the
familiar form of Dead White Males). Beam (Gracefully Insane: Life and
Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital) describes meetings
endured by the selection committee, and countless debates over
Euripedes, Herodotus, Shakespeare, Melville, Dickens and Whitman
("When it comes to Great Books, no one is without an opinion."), but
tells it like it is regarding the Syntopicon they devised-at "3,000
subtopics and 163,000 separate entries, not exactly a user-friendly
compendium"-and the resulting volumes, labeling them "icons of
unreadability-32,000 pages of tiny, double-column, eye-straining
type." By lauding the intent and intelligently critiquing the
outcome, Beam offers an insightful, accessible and fair narrative on
the Great Books, its time, and its surprisingly significant legacy.
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Idea-Time-Curious-Afterlife/dp/1586484877/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1232037930&sr=1-1
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The Universe is uncaused, like a net of jewels in which each is a
reflection of all the others in a fantastic, interrelated harmony without end.
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