Various Professors

This is also available as a 14 disk DVD set with accompanying book of 589 pages. The book does not have an ISBN.

A lecture sampler; thirty-six lectures selected from various series previously published by the Great Courses. Lots of topics, numerous lecturers, a great variety of accents. I enjoyed it, but I found that the lectures on civilizations that I knew less about were harder to follow and made less of an impression because I could not see the artifacts of that civilization in my mind's eye.

A very extensive literature overview and probably the best bang for your buck in this genre that Great Courses provides. However, with multiple lecturers the quality is not consistent - and some eras have better lecturers and coverage offered in other of their courses.

Overall, I enjoyed this enlightening sampling of lectures from various Great Courses series. However, I felt that some of the topics selected weren't as successful as others in a stand-alone format -- for these, some additional fundamental knowledge seemed to be required to fully understand the subjects, particularly while jumping in mid-series, as we are with this type of compilation.