Publisher’s Description
Many adults long to make up for an education they either never had or that seemed somehow lacking. Now they can fill in the gaps right at home with The Bedside Baccalaureate series, which speaks directly to this grown-up thirst for knowledge. The goal of The Bedside Baccalaureate is not the simple accumulation of trivia, but the placement of facts within the framework of knowledge. The twenty courses—focused overviews of subjects with which any well-educated person would want to be familiar—are created by experts in their fields with the intention of making the topics accessible and entertaining. Each course consists of eighteen single-page lectures that maximize clarity without compromising the integrity of the ideas. The lectures are rotated, rather than clumped together, to add variety to the reading experience and to mimic the heady mix of subjects one encounters in the world of the intellect. You can dip into an assortment of areas by reading a page at a time; or, if a course really grabs you, you can skip ahead.

Courses offered in The Bedside Baccalaureate include:

• General Grant’s Civil War
• Globalization
• The Hudson River School
• The Astronomical Universe
• Myths of Ancient Greece and Rome
• Emerson and Transcendentalism
• The History of the Earth
• Revolutionary France
• The Search for Alternative Energies
• Schools of Buddhist Thought
• Rocket Science
• The Worldview of Karl Marx
• The Impressionists
• Human Origins
• The Holocaust in Europe
• The Civil Rights Movement
• Empiricism
• Einstein and Relativity
• The Sects of Islam
• Masterworks of Imperial Russia

See the companion volume The Bedside Baccalaureate: The Second Semester.