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Below are reviews of some of the more interesting courses that I've tried. Courses are backed by an unconditional money-back guarantee. If you don't like it, the Teaching Company refunds your money.

History

• History of Hitler's Empire; Thomas Childers. Winner. Important for anyone interested in political processes in America today.
• From Yao to Mao: 5000 Years of Chinese History. Kenneth Hammond is the teacher and holds one's attention reasonably well. It would be nice to be listening with a detailed map of China in hand.
• History of Ancient Egypt by Bob Brier. A+. Vividly evokes the daily life of the ancients. Three thousand years of history fly by during 24 hours of lectures.

Law & Economics

• Economics; Timothy Taylor. Boring. This is the kind of professor who is popular with MBA students because he is sort of like them, shallow, young, credential-grubbing, and soulless. Economics is fundamentally dull and simple, most of the interesting stuff is mathematical. Taylor belabors trivial points over 20 lectures that an MIT undergrad could absorb in 5.
• Negligence and Torts; Frank Cross. Real law taught by a real lawyer. Awesome. You need to know this. You will never learn it in a more painless manner. Cross's examples are funny, illuminating, and usually real.
• Contracts; Frank Cross. As above, more or less, except that contracts is a somewhat less interesting topic for most people.

Literature

• Great Authors; various. Winner. Eighty lectures that will give you a new appreciation for 3000 years of literature and inspire you to read the works discussed. I never learned about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at MIT.
• Shakespeare; Peter Saccio. Winner. Saccio uncovers fun and meaning in plays both obscure and familiar.
• Science Fiction; Eric Rabkin. Good. I've never cared for most science fiction, but Rabkin shows its significance and helped me understand my fellow MIT community members. Not boring, but won't stimulate profound thought. [A couple of years after I wrote the preceding, I lifted a quote from the Rabkin course and stuck it in Chapter 15 of my book on Web publishing.]
• Urban Life; Arnold Weinstein. Winner. Draws on thousands of years of writing to illuminate the effects of the city on human life. Thought provoking.
• Understanding Literature and Life: Drama, Poetry, and Narrative; Arnold Weinstein. Excellent. The 64 lectures would be worth it if you only took away Weinstein's idea of why we have plays, poems, and novels (rather than just one literary form). But there is so much to like here and Weinstein brings in a lot of unexpected works (though it is annoying the way he constantly refers to them as "texts").

Music

• How to Understand the Listen to Great Music; Robert Greenberg. Very good. I have 2000 classical LPs and have read the jacket copy for most of them. Still, I learned a lot of great ways to look at musical ideas from Greenberg. Also, he embellishes his lectures with some fun anecdotes, e.g., how Bach gets fired from his job by Prince Leopold of Köthen's new wife.
• Bach and the High Baroque; Robert Greenberg. Challenging while driving. It is fascinating to go deeper into some musical ideas but I think this might be too difficult (1) with the distractions of the road, (2) without some graphic aids. Get the video version and watch it at home.
• Stravinsky, also by Greenberg. Easy to follow while driving and interesting because Stravinsky's career covers so much of the development of 20th century music.

Philosophy

• Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition; various but mostly Michael Sugrue and Darren Staloff. Fair to Excellent but mostly Excellent. These 70 lectures cover 3000 years of philosophy sufficiently well that you'll be able to hold your own at an Ivy League cocktail party. You'll also probably be inspired to do a little reading. The main problem with the class is that the two main lecturers are too young (under 40?) and can get on your nerves at times.
• Freedom, the Philosophy of Liberation; Dennis Dalton. Winner. A fabulous blend of history, philosophy, and political theory.
• Self under Siege; Rick Roderick. Fair. Roderick is scornful of bourgeois suburban American life. This may make him popular with college students, but it is grating on adult ears (at least the ears of this bourgeois American suburbanite!). On the other hand, Roderick is very strong on translating abstract philosophies into terms that modern people can understand.
• Birth of the Modern Mind; Alan Charles Kors. Excellent. Kors brings the Enlightenment to life, continued in the Mind of the Enlightenment, which is also very good.

Science

• History of Science: 1700-1900. Fair. Frederick Gregory is the teacher and takes a long time to get started. The entire first lecture can be skipped, as can most of the second. At least in the audio version, there isn't quite enough science in these lectures and Gregory does not explain scientific principles in any detail. Fairly strong on personalities and biographies.

Physics

• Cosmic Questions; Robert Kirshner. Winner. Kirshner is at Harvard and listening to him you can understand why hey have such a strong astrophysics program. My astrophyicist friends tell me that they have to be broader than any other physicists in order to combine knowledge from many sources to figure out what goes on out there. Kirshner shows you the process.
• Relativity and the Quantum Revolution; Richard Wolfson. Don't try this one in your car. I did and you'd have to pull over every five minutes to inspect a drawing in the booklet and think. Physics is hard; get this on video. The examples are well chosen.

Politics

Psychology

• Explaining Social Deviance; Paul Root Wolpe. Fair. Really a sociology course and the best thing about it is that it shows how confused and tentative are the thought processes of sociologists.
• Abnormal Psych; Drew Westen. Excellent. Now you won't be overmatched when a friend starts spewing psychobabble to explain your thinking. Explains this Freud guy.

Religion

• Comparative Religions; Robert Oden. Winner. You aren't going to make too many friends if you go to an Orthodox dinner and tell people about all the stuff in the Hebrew Bible that was lifted from earlier religious texts, but hey.
• Great World Religons; various. Mixed. This is a five-part series. Some of the lectures are almost laughably bad, e.g., John Swanson's Islam. I listened to it with an MIT undergrad and she couldn't believe how many words it took him to say something simple, how much time was wasted in repetition or saying what he was going to say. But you can order the pieces separately. To me the Jewish and Islamic courses were the weakest; Diana Eck's Religions of India the strongest.

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