Sunday 20 January 2008

Penguin Great Ideas Series

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

When Penguin released their Great Ideas Series, I have to admit that I bought the books for their covers. I did always mean to read them too, however, and so in 2008 (and 2009) I'm going to read two 'great ideas' a month for 20 months. I'll be picking them at random and will blog a review of each as I go along. Click on a link below to see which ones I've reviewed so far...

    Series 1 (Red)
  1. Seneca - On the Shortness of Life
  2. Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
  3. St Augustine - Confessions of a Sinner
  4. Thomas a Kempis - The Inner Life
  5. Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince
  6. Michel de Montaigne - On Friendship
  7. Jonathan Swift - A Tale of a Tub
  8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract
  9. Edward Gibbon - The Christians and the Fall of Rome
  10. Thomas Paine - Common Sense
  11. Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
  12. William Hazlitt - On the Pleasure of Hating
  13. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto
  14. Arthur Schopenhauer - On the Suffering of the World
  15. John Ruskin - On Art and Life
  16. Charles Darwin - On Natural Selection
  17. Friedrich Nietzsche - Why I Am So Wise
  18. Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own
  19. Sigmund Freud - Civilization and its Discontents
  20. George Orwell - Why I Write


    Series 2 (Blue)
  21. Confucius - The First Ten Books
  22. Sun-tzu - The Art of War
  23. Plato - The Symposium
  24. Lucretius - Sensation and Sex
  25. Cicero - An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom
  26. The Revelation of St. John the Divine and The Book of Job
  27. Marco Polo - Travels in the land of Kubilai Khan
  28. Christine de Pizan - The City of Ladies
  29. Baldesar Castiglione - How to Achieve True Greatness
  30. Francis Bacon - Of Empire
  31. Thomas Hobbes - Of Man
  32. Sir Thomas Browne - Urne-Burial
  33. Voltaire - Miracles and Idolatry
  34. David Hume - On Suicide
  35. Carl Clausewitz - On the Nature of War
  36. Soren Kierkegaard - Fear and Trembling
  37. Henry David Thoreau - Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
  38. Thorstein Veblen - Conspicuous Consumption
  39. Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
  40. Hannah Arendt - Eichmann and the Holocaust

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