This is yet another of the Learning Company’s “Great Courses”. It takes a learner through the very basics to some fairly advanced theory while giving a history of Western music along the way.
Understanding the Fundamentals of Music
My Comments
There are over 23 hours of content in this course and I had to slow my listening down so I could hear the music properly. I LOVED IT! I can’t say enough good things about this course. I kept bothering my family about something I learned that day or something I thought was hilarious. Great, great, great course.
Recommendations
Everyone should listen to this course by Robert Greenberg. Play it for your spouse, neighbors, friends, distant relations, and children (including in utero).
Yet another of the “Great Courses” series, The American Civil War is a lecture given by Professor Gary W. Gallagher, Ph.D. of the University of Virginia. This lecture series is over 24 hours of lecture. As such it took me a while to get through… Professor Gallagher takes us from what lead up to the war before the election of 1860 and details everything through the early parts of reconstruction and how we remember the war today. It was recorded in the early 2000’s.
The American Civil War
Comments
I live in Virginia and continue to be very interested in what happened during the civil war. Although this was a long lecture, I was kept engaged and found myself wanting to know more. I very much enjoyed Professor Gallagher’s presentation of each side and how he touched on many of the theories and popular misconceptions about the war. I feel he gave a balanced account to what had happened and he made sense of a subject highly sensationalized and used for propaganda on both sides. I still want to know more about it and I feel I have been given a good foundation.
Recommendation
This lecture series is not for the faint of heart. There is a lot of material and it will take some time to get through it all. However, I highly recommend it to all Americans. Both those who want to know more about the war and those who should want to know more.
Yet again, not a book but a lecture series by the Great Courses. Power over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory, is given by Professor Dennis Dalton, Ph.D. of Barnard College, Columbia University.
Power over People: Classical and Modern Political Theory
The Scope
There are 16 lectures in the series with each lecture being 46 minutes. Dr. Dalton quickly covers all the ground from the Greeks to 20th century thinkers and how they saw their world around them.
Take Away
Honestly, I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I did the last course on Greek Philosophy. In some elements, this course and the other are in opposition. Dr. Dalton states Plato was a fond student of Socrates while Professor Roochnik states that wasn’t the case.
Not to disparage the course, I found Dr. Dalton to be engaging and very interesting. Perhaps it was just too broad of a sweep since he had too much ground to cover. Still, many of the facts presented were new to me. Karl Marx’s abject poverty and his writing in London. Gandhi’s inspiration from a quote by Thoreau. The climb of power of Hitler and so on. I was glad I experienced it.
Rating
I would recommend this to most people. It was a good overview.
The lectures took us from the early Greek philosophers and we made it to Socrates at lecture 8. Lectures 9 – 16 were on Plato and 17 – 23 were on Aristotle. The final lecture was on the “Philosophical Life” which wrapped it all together. Each lecture was 30 minutes long.
Take Away
I enjoyed the lectures. Professor Roochnik did a wonderful job of keeping me engaged through the series and I feel I learned a great deal. I have always been interested in philosophy and I was pleasantly surprised with how much ground the Greeks covered and what impact they had on Western thought.
I had no idea Socrates was such a minor figure. After all, Bill and Ted picked up Socrates not Plato or Aristotle… I came away thinking of Socrates less like the Grandfatherly figure shepherding his young students along to more of a Rodney Dangerfield was just “can’t get any respect”.
I knew of Plato’s Republic. I had heard of his analogy of the shadows on the cave wall but I didn’t know he only wrote in conversations and never really came out and stated what he as Plato felt. This seems to be very subjective…
I knew nearly nothing of Aristotle. Of course, I had heard the name and knew he was Plato’s student but that was really about it. I appreciated seeing where he differed from Plato and how he thoughts were the basis of thought throughout so much of Western history. I’m left to wonder what the role of women would have been in the last 2000 years had Plato been the last word on the subject.
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry is written by Neil de Grasse Tyson in 2017.
Scope
It is 202 pages covering a wide swath of knowledge in science. If you have watched Dr. Tyson’s reboot of “Cosmos”, most of the material will not be new.
Take Away
Dr. Tyson is a master instructor and lecturer. I have listened to his podcast “Star Talk” since the beginning so none of the information presented was new or even unexpected. However, I loved it! He did a great job wrapping all those thoughts together and presenting it in an understandable form. A quick read and a good reference item.
