May 8, 2008...12:51 pm
The Great Brain Series
My children loved The Great Brain books by John D. Fitzgerald starting in the 2nd or 3rd grade. I enjoyed reading them out loud immensely.
There’s a good Wikipedia article about this series, so I’ll only give a brief summary here. Each book is a series of episodes about a Catholic family living in southern Utah in the late 1800’s. The narrator is the younger brother of the main character, Tom D. Fitzgerald, otherwise known as The Great Brain because nobody ever seems to get the better of him. The very first chapter is about the installation of the first flush toilet in the whole town at their house and how The Great Brain turns it to his advantage.
I enjoyed the descriptions of life out west, since family was from Idaho, I did some of my growing up there, but my children had never experienced the open skies, sagebrush, and tumbleweeds of western landscapes or bluntness and directness of western culture.
My particular reason for including these books in the positive canon is the way they show an outstanding character strength being used in widely different ways, some morally good, some not. Tom is a paragon of social intelligence, but you can never tell whether he’ll be using it in a particular episode to manipulate people or to help them solve human puzzles that daunt even the adults in his world. He is very aware of his ability — he calls himself The Great Brain. But just when you are wanting to give up on the way he tricks people to get his own way, he exhibits true wisdom and unselfishness. It’s a useful reminder about the power of character strengths and the mixed nature of ways they can be applied.
Besides, the stories in the 7 book series are just plain fun for both children and adults.
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