Seeking a Center: My Life As a "Great Bookie"

This is a stimulating intellectual and spiritual autobiography of Otto Bird, a pioneer in the Great Books Movement in this country. It tells of his involvement with the exciting and influential reforms of Adler and Hutchins at the University of Chicago, his training as mediaevalist under the renowned Etienne Gilson at the Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, and his founding of the Great Books Program at the University of Notre Dame. Then, in describing a personal philosophical search, Bird shows how, by pursuing the methods introduced by Gilson and Adler, he was able to make sense out of the confusion of philosophers and provides an example in an analysis of the controversy concerning the idea of justice. The center that he sought was found in the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas and in the Roman Catholic church to which he became a convert. Bird's story provides unique insights into the development of the Great Books Movement and its influence upon American college education, to which a large part of his life was devoted by way of teaching, and writing through association from the beginning with the set Great Books of the Western World, published by Encyclopaedia Britannica.