Great Books - The Art of War

Great Books: Art of War
Running Time: 50 min.
Produced By: / Discovery Communications

Cast and Crew:
Donald Sutherland (Narrator)

The Great Books series is based on an idea by John S. Hendricks, chairman and CEO of Discovery Communication Inc. -which owns The Learning Channel," said John Y. Cole, director of the Center for the Book. "The Center for the Book formed an advisory panel to help select books to be included in the series, and we continue to offer advice and other kinds of help. We are pleased that each program carries a separate acknowledgement, Produced in Cooperation with the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

Great Books began airing on The Learning Channel in 1993 with programs about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, and Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur. The next programs to be aired were Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds, the fourth century B.C. classic The Art of War, by Sun Tze and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Other books to be featured include Joseph Heller's Catch- 22, Native Son by Richard Wright, Plato's The Republic, The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Machiavelli's The Prince, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, Moby Dick by Herman Melville and Homer's The Odyssey.

Filmed throughout the world, programs in the series include film clips from movies and interviews with scholars, writers, musicians, filmmakers and world leaders, thus presenting a variety of interpretations about the book and its effect on the world today.

For example, actor Donald Sutherland, who narrates the series, interviews Grace Slick of the Jefferson Airplane, Lewis Carroll biographer Morton Cohen and the president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America (Alice in Wonderland); British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss and "Star Trek's" Leonard Nimoy (War of the Worlds); and Army Gen. William Westmoreland, Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap and U.S. Naval War College Professor Arthur Waldron (The Art of War).