(0)
(0)
(0)Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Summary
Fielding's classic novel chronicles the adventures of Tom Jones, who was abandoned as an infant and grows into a lusty, imprudent young man. Promising to mend his ways, Tom competes with an abusive rival for the affections of a wealthy squire's daughter, and eventually learns the truth about his identity.
Author
Series
Summary
Why this critique is called simply Critique of Practical Reason and not Critique of Pure Practical Reason, though the parallelism between it and the critique of speculative reason seems to demand the latter title, will be sufficiently shown in the treatise itself. Its task is merely to show that there is a pure practical reason, and, in order to do this, it critically examines reason's entire practical faculty. If it succeeds in this task, there is...
4) The prince
Author
Series
Summary
Need to seize a country? Have enemies you must destroy? In this handbook for despots and tyrants, the Renaissance statesman Machiavelli sets forth how to accomplish this and more, while avoiding the awkwardness of becoming generally hated and despised. "Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be...
Author
Summary
Presents Jonathan Swift's satire in which a shipwrecked Englishman encounters bizarre populations in unheard-of lands, including an enlightened race of horses that makes him see his fellow humans in a different light; and includes explanatory notes and a note on the text, which is based on the 1726 edition.
Author
Series
Summary
"Moby Dick by Herman Melville is the story of Captain Ahab's quest to avenge the whale that 'reaped' his leg. The quest is an obsession and the novel is a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. But it is also a hymn to democracy. Bent as the crew is on Ahab's appalling crusade, it is equally the image of a co-operative community at work: all hands dependent on all hands, each individual responsible for the security of each. Among the crew...
Author
Series
Great books of the Western world volume 22
Summary
Considered one of Chaucer's finest poems, second only to The Canterbury Tales in richness and depth, Troilus and Cressida is a tragic love story set against the background of the siege of Troy by the Greeks.
Written in the 1380s, it presents Troilus, son of Priam and younger brother of Hector, as a Trojan warrior of renown who sees, and falls deeply in love with, the beautiful Cressida. Cressida is the daughter of Calchas, a Trojan priest and seer...
Author
Series
Summary
The Dialogues of Plato, written between 427 and 347 b.c., rank among the most important and influential works in Western thought. Most famous are the first four, in which Plato casts his teacher Socrates as the central disputant in colloquies that brilliantly probe a vast spectrum of philosophical ideas and issues. Socrates' ancient words are still true, and the ideas found in Plato's Dialogues still form the foundation of a thinking person's education....
Author
Summary
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide & family rivalry that embodies the moral & spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime & Punishment. To Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, & profligacy. Significantly,...
Author
Series
Summary
The first volume of Decline and Fall was published in 1776, and by the time the final volume appeared in 1787, Gibbon had produced an exhaustive, million-and-a-half-word account of a 'revolution, which shall ever be remembered and is still felt by the nations of the earth'.
This panoramic work, covering 13 centuries from 180 A.D. to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, has been described as 'a bridge that carries one from the ancient world to the...
Author
Series
Summary
Introduces young readers to the fascinating and exciting world of Greek mythology. "The Iliad" tells of the long, long siege of Troy which ends when the Greeks win the war using a wooden horse. Odysseus is one of the Greek warriors and "The Odyssey" describes his amazing adventures on his voyage home from the Trojan War.
13) Capital
Author
Series
Critique of Political Economy
Great books of the Western World volume 50
Everyman's library volume no. 848-849
Great books of the Western World volume 50
Everyman's library volume no. 848-849
Summary
Perhaps one of the most infamous works of the modern world, Capital is the German treatise on political economy by Karl Marx that critically analyzes capitalism. First published in 1867 as the beginning of an ambitious but unfinished six-volume series, this work extensively attempts to expose and explain the capitalist mode of production and the class struggles embedded within it. Capital was written while Marx was exiled in England, and many of the...
Author
Series
Great books of the Western world volume 24
Summary
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais, telling the adventures of two giants, Gargantua and his son Pantagruel. The work is written in an amusing, extravagant, and satirical vein; features much erudition, vulgarity, and wordplay; and is regularly compared with the works of William Shakespeare and James Joyce. Rabelais was a polyglot, and the work introduced "a great number...
