Anybody taken a course on TheGreatCourses.com?

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Is it possible to send for them as CDs or DVD’s, in the mail?
 
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As far as I’m aware, most of their courses are available to buy on DVD for delivery to your home. The DVDs are their most expensive option, but their business is modeled on promoting portions of their catalogue throughout the year at deep discounts. You can be sure that any course, in any format, will have gone on sale two or three times a year.
 
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Unless the course is in something visual, I’d just do audible. I don’t know that you lose much by not seeing someone standing at a podium lecturing.
 
Is that all the visual is? I was expecting like, pictures.

I agree that I hate “talking head videos”. I’m sure you, like me, have seen so many talking head videos for bar review and CLE. They’re dreadful and actually distract me from the subject matter.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
Is that all the visual is? I was expecting like, pictures.
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Depends on the course.

With some of the courses you can get by with just the audio.

However, I’m thinking about the marine biology course I purchased a few years ago; it’s anything but a “talking head” course, with scenes from real life.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
Is that all the visual is? I was expecting like, pictures.
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I’m sure it varies by the course. I’m listening to one on ancient Egyptian history and I feel like just the audio is fine. Plus I like being able to listen while I’m driving or doing chores. I wouldn’t want to just sit and watch
 
I’ve listened to ten full Great Courses series and portions of a few others. Of these courses, I found only two of them disappointing: the Art of War and Rise and Fall of Soviet Communism: A History of 20th-Century Russia. The latter course I didn’t know at the time was produced in the mid '90s soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, when I had hoped for more coverage of recent Russian history that immediately followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. (For those who are interested, Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history, Secondhand Time: the Last of the Soviets, is a stunning survey of voices who recount this moment in Russian history and the tumultuous life that followed for them.)

All the other courses, ranging in topics such as the Aeneid, the City of God, and crafting great sentences, to the intellectual history of the 17th and 18th centuries, the modern history of political thought, and substance abuse disorder I could hardly be more satisfied with. The course Books That Matter: the City of God I especially recommend. The professor covers the entire work, chapter by chapter, of St. Augustine’s epic City of God with stirring eloquence and sensitivity to the intellectual depth of Augustine’s thought. You are not just made an acquaintance of Augustine; you explore in great detail and assess in grand summary the full scope of the major themes of the book and the historical context it was written in. Augustine becomes for us a living person who can still speak to us today on the problems of evil and the history of man and his salvation through Christ.
 
Tommy999 said:
I watched one on the ‘Black Death’ which I thought was well done.
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I almost hate to describe it this way, but that was a fun course. The rats seemed to multiply as the course wore on, and were in different places on the set for each lecture 😃

D
 
I’m with you, Dave. It was a fun course despite the subject matter. I learned things from that course that I hadn’t learned previously or maybe potentially had forgotten, such as cases in Europe where Jews were killed as a scapegoat accused of poisoning wells, etc.

As a religious person, I was also interested in how the Church and believers responded to the Black Death. I was proud of and heartened by stories of brave priests who risked their lives (and often lost them) after contracting the plague when ministering last rites to the sick, and the fact that many people kept the faith in spite of nearly half the population of Europe dying from the Black Death.

Note: My wife still laughs at what she describes as an inappropriate smile on my face in a vacation photo where I am pictured in the backdrop of a bunch of gravestones at Little Big Horn. She said I look like a kid at an amusement park. What can I say? I like history. 😀
 
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Has anyone happened to take the course on Joyce’s “Ulysses”?

I like the idea of learning about Joyce, but as an undergrad engg major I went to a lecture on Ulysses once with a friend doing a lib arts degree who I thought was very cool and awesome. The lecture was like torture - I couldn’t believe the writings of a fun guy like Joyce were being dissected in this way, seemingly with tweezers, plus we weren’t allowed to read or eat or doze off in the lecture (we did all those things in engineering core classes and no one cared), nor could I see the use of any such class in practical life - and the friend I went with turned out to be a bad egg.

I pictured Joyce in the hereafter laughing heartily at such a scenario.

Since that was going on 40 years ago I was thinking maybe I should give it another chance with a different professor. Although I can’t understand why we can’t just read and enjoy the book, perhaps in an edition with footnotes.
 
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James Joyce once joked, in writing Ulysses, that he “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries, arguing over what I meant.” I’m sure he was being ironic, and I wonder that if he would stumble onto a lecture that you attended where his book was dissected in such a fashion, he would find it risible. Imagine Vladimir Nabokov at the podium insisting that knowledge of the geography of Dublin was utterly essential in understanding Ulysses. Perhaps there’s some truth to that, but it’s also difficult to imagine Nabokov savoring any of Joyce’s countless word games or uttering a guffaw. For Joyce, there’s more to see in literature than what is seen through a magnifying glass. There’s a world of delight, too: an experience to be appreciated among friends and colleagues who share a cultural heritage.

Ahem. Anyhow, no, I haven’t listened to the course on Ulysses, but it is something I’d be interested in listening to eventually. Whenever I’ve attempted to read Joyce’s novels, I couldn’t help thinking that the history and culture of Ireland is so ingrained in his work, that a world of meaning is lost on me, a lowly American, decades removed from the writer’s own time. Thomas Pynchon is, in that regard, more accessible to me.
 
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I’ve got it on my wish list and by George! I think that’s going to be my next course! Glad to hear it’s good and you liked it! Thanks ❤️
 
Thanks all, I decided to go for the specially priced instant audio set of “Popes and the Papacy” + History of the Catholic Church. They were going as a set for under 50 dollars, neither is on Great Courses Plus or Kanopy, and I reckon they will keep me busy for weeks.
 
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