Best Sellers from the Great Courses

Taking great photographs requires you to "see" as a professional photographer does; to train your eyes using the same fundamental techniques and principles the experts use to create unforgettable images from the grandest (and simplest) of subjects. With Fundamentals of Photography, you'll learn everything you need to know about the art and craft of great photography straight from a professional photographer with more than 30 years of experience. Designed for people at all levels, these 24 lectures are an engaging guide to how photographs work and how to make them work better for you.

• Save Up To $185

It’s rare to find a truly gifted chef who can actually show you how to cook. Now, The Great Courses has joined forces with the prestigious Culinary Institute of America to give you just that. The Everyday Gourmet: Rediscovering the Lost Art of Cooking is a course of 24 highly visual and instructional lessons in which you’ll build all the foundational culinary skills you need to turn out delicious and impressive meals. Filmed on location at the CIA’s Greystone campus in Napa Valley, California, and delivered by Chef Bill Briwa—one of the CIA’s experienced instructors and a chef with more than 35 years of professional experience—these lessons show you how to cook and evaluate dishes, from starters and main courses to desserts and vegetarian meals. They also offer a master chef’s insight into tips, tricks, and secrets that will elevate any dish you make from good to great.

• Save Up To $185

• Save Up To $390

Take this chance to get beyond the abstract dates and figures, kings and queens, and battles and wars that make up so many historical accounts in The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World. In 48 richly detailed lectures, Professor Robert Garland of Colgate University covers the breadth and depth of human history from the perspective of the so-called ordinary people, from its earliest beginnings through the Middle Ages. The past truly comes alive in this ambitious course, as Professor Garland takes a series of imaginative leaps to put you inside the world of history’s anonymous citizens, providing you with a fuller understanding of the distant past.

Whether your goal is to live to be 100, run a marathon, reduce your waistline, or just get the most from daily life, functional fitness is the foundation for active and dynamic living and the best quality of life you can have. In Physiology and Fitness, international fitness expert Dean Hodgkin shows you a new, scientifically based way to reach your own optimum fitness and to keep it for life. This course presents a groundbreaking approach to fitness education that brings together scientific knowledge with results-driven practice in a wholly integrated system, allowing you to enjoy the rich vitality and health that prime fitness offers—whatever your age or current fitness level.

Learn how to invest with skill and confidence to attain your financial goals with the 24 timely and informative lectures of Understanding Investments. Economist and Professor Connel Fullenkamp explains the fundamentals of investing to those new to the subject while broadening and deepening the knowledge of more experienced investors. He clearly explains the various kinds of financial markets, the different kinds of investments available to you, and the pros and cons of each—and shows you how to evaluate each of these in terms of your own financial situation and goals.

• Save Up To $160

Discover the beauty and simplicity of science's most fundamental branch with Physics and Our Universe: How It All Works. Intensively illustrated with diagrams, experiments, animations, graphs, and other visual aids, these 60 lectures by engaging and award-winning Professor Richard Wolfson introduce you to scores of fundamental ideas such as Newtonian mechanics, waves and fluids, thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, optics, and relativity and quantum theory.

What is the most effective way to nurture your own optimal health? Are there sound alternatives to the drugs so common in our health-care system, which can carry unwanted consequences and side effects? In the 24 lectures of The Science of Natural Healing, board-certified cardiologist Dr. Mimi Guarneri, founder of the Scripps Center for Integrative Medicine, leads you in a compelling and practical exploration of holistic approaches to healthcare, introducing you to the many nature-based treatments and methods that are both clinically proven and readily available to you.

Investigate the myriad ways we think about, talk about, and write sentences. In Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft, Professor Brooks Landon from the University of Iowa—one of the nation's top writing schools—shows you the pleasure in reading and writing great sentences. Explore the stylistic rewards (and risks) of various sentence forms, learn how to build and appreciate effective and elegant sentences, get unique insights into the nature of great writing—and discover how you can achieve some of this greatness yourself.

• Save Up To $275

• Save Up To $520

Military strategy matters. Civilizations with the greatest strategists—often coupled with the greatest resources—have had a powerful edge over competing civilizations. From Napoleon’s revolutionary campaigns to the way insurgency, terrorism, and nuclear weaponry have defined the nature of warfare in the 21st century, the results of military strategy have changed the course of history. Masters of War: History’s Greatest Strategic Thinkers gives you an inside look at both the content and historical context of the world’s greatest war strategists. Taught by Professor Andrew R. Wilson, these 24 lectures will instill in you a new appreciation for the subtleties and complexities of strategy.