Rating: 
Summary: Opening up new horizons
Review: I thought I was educated before, but this wonderful book taught me new reading skills and whetted my appetite for the classics. Though I went to a good high school and college, I spent most of my time hearing about how "great" the Great Books were, without being much encouraged to sit down and crack one open. The Well-Educated Mind has helped to change that, which is why I disagree with the negative review posted earlier on this page. Maybe we "should" have learned how, why, and what to read in our schools, but many of us were not taught, and the Well-Educated mind aims to fill that gap. For this reason, I would highly recommend it for high-school students or for those about to start college.
The opening section alone, on getting the most out of reading, should be handed out in every local library. Don't miss the chapters on drama and poetry, either: too many people ignore these genres because of their seeming inaccessibility, but here Susan Wise Bauer provides superb keys and useful skills.
Knowledgeable without being a show-off, friendly without dumbing-down, Bauer makes an excellent guide for those who want to enter the "great conversation."
Rating: 
Summary: A great book, but I hoped for a touch more
Review: I thought, after loving Well-Trained Mind, that this would be a sort of re-education for me. I would read through some timeline-style history book, review some science in an orderly fashion, get some guidelines on foreign language study, get a great books list, get some tips on math improvement. This is what I thought.
This is more an annotated great books list than an education replacement plan. I enjoy the book and am attempting to start at the beginning of the list (Don Quixote) and work through. I am excited about going through the books and using the note-taking and rhetoric techniques she suggests. I just wish the book would have covered more aspects.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Fantastic!
Review: I typically buy 75-100 books a year through Amazon[.com] and spend hours and hours reading reviews before I ultimately make my purchase. When I [got]Bauer's book, I just couldn't put it down. Not only does she lay out in detail the necessary steps in developing an appreciation and understanding for the "Great Books of Civilization" she actually shows you how to do it and gives you an abundant of resources to aid you if you need more help. Not since Mortimer Adler's book "How to Read a Book" have I ever come across such a lucid approach to raising one's awareness of the world's greatest writers.
In addition to laying out the groundwork for setting up a self-study program, Bauer provides a detailed approach to each of her recommended readings, from "The Epic of Gilgamesh, c. 2000 B.C. to Elie Wiesel's "All Rivers Run to the Sea", 1995.
A warning however for the "undisciplined mind". Unless you are prepared to commit the necessary time (Bauer recommends 30 minutes a day, 4 days a week) to do some "really serious reading" using a personalized "commonplace book" (which she describes in detail) to record your learnings and critiques -- you are wasting your time. It's akin to losing 25 pounds through disciplined dieting or getting out of debt in 12 months through focused efforts. You either commit yourself to a life-long learning plan to raise your consciousness and self-awarness or simply go back and waste away by watching T.V. and munching on your doritos. The choice is yours.
Rating:
Summary: Run Don't Walk to Buy this Book
Review: If you ever had an urge or calling to know there is more out there than meets the eye as far as education goes or if you are homeschooling your child in the classical sense then please buy this book Susan Wise gives you everything you need to know and then some to give you the education you always wanted but didn't know how to achieve it. This will also help your high schooler attempt the great book list along with everything else they need to know to be highly educated before college so that remedial courses are not even a question. I appreciate Susan's help without attending college to proceed through the great books to understand Westeren civilization amoung many other things. She is truly a God send to teach us even though she endured many hours of college as well as having very young children, family life, and laundry..etc That you can do this with her help and a fee of $27.95 for her book far less than a college course to tackle the important books of our time and gain our own understanding of just where this world is headed and to not be deceived in the iterim. If you are just starting out in this venture of Christian classical teaching then read her first book The Well Trained Mind to help you prepare all you need too for your child then read this for yourself. I can't say enough about how this has helped me so that I can help teach my own children.
Rating:
Summary: Hard Work, Worthy Cause
Review: Organizes homeschooling into How to.
Her expectations are HIGH!
Hope you are not afraid of hard work!
She covers everything and is very knowledgeable. If you homeschool based on her curriculum guidelines, you will be doing an absolutely tremendous job! If you fall short, your still doing great. Great ideas. Great guidelines. Great coverage. For starters, combine this with "What Every Kindergardener Needs to Know" and "Cultural Literacy" both by ED Hirsch.
Rating:
Summary: Filling in the Gaps
Review: Remember those unsightly gaps in your smile when you lost a tooth? The missing front teeth were especially noticeable. Even the best childhood education has learning gaps, which sometimes are most noticeable when you want to look your best.
Bauer has prepared an easy-to-follow program for filling in some of those unsightly gaps. While academic knowledge is not the only necessary knowledge, after wrestling with computer tutorials, business advice, and political analyses, I find it refreshing to increase my personal knowledge.
The book could have been shortened by approximately 100 pages, but the reviews are on-target for selecting best reads if you aren't sure where to begin, and the chronological arrangement is most helpful in following historical and academic developments.
The questions Bauer poses are fundamental and comprehensive. These questions are the real meat of the book. By pondering Bauer's questions, you will engage and sometime lock horns with various writers from ancient to modern. To read words from a book is not the same as to interpret and understand the meaning of a book. I simplified several of the lower level questions and used them with my young tutoring students after I had digested several novels, using Bauer's method.
Rating:
Summary: Read this book in addition to Adler and Van Doren
Review: The goal of this book is to show how the Great Books can be engaged by applying the methods of classical education to enable more effective reading, analysis, and criticism. I think Bauer did a great job in meeting this task by providing detailed guidelines for tackling five different literary genres (novels, autobiographies, history, drama, and poetry). In addition, she backs up the use of these guidelines by providing short histories that describe the development of each genre and which, as a result, show readers what they should be looking for in each type of work. Finally, reading lists for each genre are provided to enable readers to practice their new skills in grammatical, logical, and rhetorical reading.Although this book is publicized as being for the "adult reader", I think that Bauer may have attempted to include the homeschooling crowd as well, especially considering that her previous books were aimed toward this latter audience. Consequently, an "adult reader" may find the first four chapters to be a bit patronizing as various issues are discussed, including how to make your own notebook, how to increase your vocabulary, how to set up a time for reading, etc. However, once readers progress into the heart of the book (i.e. the discussion of the five literary genres), I think that they will be willing to forget their previous misgivings and find this to be a very useful guidebook (I did at least). I believe that the suggestions presented in this book fit very nicely within the solid framework provided by Adler and Van Doren's "How to Read a Book". Adler and Van Doren do an excellent job of explaining why and how one should go about reading the Great Books for understanding. However, their discussion primarily focused on reading nonfictional works, and I felt that the suggestions they provided for reading fiction were a bit insufficient. Consequently, I believe "The Well-Educated Mind" complements Adler and Van Doren very nicely and would heartily recommend that these two books be read in conjunction.
Rating:
Summary: The great classics are for everyone
Review: The great classic are for everyone and a book like this one shows how everyone, from whatever background originally, can come to learn to appreciate the great classics that we have all come to know and love. You too can appreciate great literature - you don't need a Harvard degree to love Jane Austen or the novel Moby Dick. Greatness is within your grasp - get out there and change your life today! Christopher Catherwood, author of CHRISTIANS, MUSLIMS AND ISLAMIC RAGE (Zondervan, 2003)
Rating: 
Summary: A great concept, but ultimately the book falls flat
Review: There seems to be wildly divergent views on the merits of this book, and there is likely truth to all of them. It's an appealing concept, but in the end the best thing about the book is the short summaries of all the listed novels. egardless, the division of old and new classics into useful cateogories and then short summaries to help the reader pick and choose the most suitable books for him / her is very helpful.
Here are the problems, however, with the 1/4 of the book that strives to teach you a self-education system. First, the author writes down to the reader like the reader is utterly incompetent, such as the first step in "how to read a novel" is to "look at the title, cover, and table of contents"!!!!! The author seems to say at numerous points that a liberal arts education is overblown and you will just learn to follow the herd, and then in the next sentence proceeds to tell you exactly how you should read a novel in lockstep with the herd.
Different people will take away different impressions and lessons from the "classics." That's the point. This book is way too touchy-feely while at the same time way too strict in demanding that you follow this 12 step plan. Buy the book if you want the summaries of what is admittedly a broad and great list of classics, but don't be fooled into thinking it is any form of revolutionary idea or self-education process. It's really like a pompous professor dryly lecturing you in the privacy of your own home, which does not seem like "self education" to me.
Rating: 
Summary: The Well-Scrambled Mind
Review: Thoreau once compared a serious reading of the Classics to the training of an Olympic athlete. Ms. Wise Bauer, on the other hand, recommends a mere 30 minutes a day, four days a week with weekends off, and "flex mornings" to catch-up with paperwork, be there when the plumber arrives, or when the toddler develops stomach flu (see below). By the end of the first chapter, the author has effectively reduced her audience to stay-at-home moms.
The writer begins the book by lamenting her return to graduate school, feeling awkward and out of place in a room full of teenage-looking students, at the freshly minted age of thirty. We then hear of scheduling conflicts with family time, low university pay, inadequate health insurance, and anesthesia during childbirth- all in the first paragraph of Chapter 1. Two paragraphs later, the author tells of her "work-induced psychosis": staying up late finishing papers and getting up early with the baby; writing her dissertation on the living room floor with a Thomas the Tank engine nearby; spending the night before an upcoming French exam washing her four-year old's sheets and pillows after he catches the stomach flu; and, finally, attending required workshops that were a total waste of her time.
The author then takes an abrupt turn by quoting Thomas Jefferson in a letter to his nephew on the rewards of self-education. The reader must then unscramble the mess in order to get her point. What the author is supposedly trying to say is that graduate school, for the pursuit of a liberal education, comes at too high a cost for the rewards it renders, and that interested students should instead consider reading books on their own and discussing them with their neighbors. Except of course in South-Central Los Angeles where a disagreement often ends up with someone dead.
The author then tiptoes around the Great Books, careful not to offend the reader by placing too much demand on their time or alleviating them of the responsibility to think by providing them with endless analyses and interpretations. Her book annotations, while beginning to whet the appetite, ultimately serve only to disappoint those unfamiliar with the texts by giving away the ending rather than a general preview. Many quotes used throughout the book, especially in the opening chapters, were distracting when the author's own voice would have been a far better choice in connecting with and perhaps even inspiring her audience.
A series of indiscriminate, rambling entries directed at no one in particular, "The Well-Educated Mind" reads like a journal randomly pasted to a manuscript. Although noble in her efforts to promote the Great Books, Ms. Wise Bauer has embarked on more of a personal enterprise rather than torchbearer for the classical education you never had.
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