Books that changed the world
Subtitle: the 50 most influential books in human history
By: Andrew Taylor
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2008
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 207
ISBN-13: 9781847246028; 9781847242549
Subjects: Literature and history; Best books
Description: Contains profiles of fifty of history's most important and influential books, as selected by journalist and author Andrew Taylor, each with a summary of the contents, and a discussion of its historical context and legacy.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: The Iliad (c. 8th century BC, Homer) : The Iliad in English; title: The histories (5th century BC, Herodotus) : true lies; title: The analects (5th century BC, Confucius) : Confucius goes global; title: The republic (4th century BC, Plato) : into the light; title: The Bible (2nd century BC; title: 2nd century AD) : The King James Bible; title: Odes (23-13 BC, Horace); title: Geographia (c. AD 100-170, Ptolemy) : the Almagest; title: Kama sutra (2nd or 3rd century AD, Mallanaga Vatsyayana) : Eroticism in stone; title: The Qur'an (7th century) : translating the Qur'an; title: Canon of medicine (1025, Avicenna) : fathers of medicine; title: The Canterbury tales (1380's-90's, Geoffrey Chaucer) : Chaucer's 24 pilgrims' tales; title: The prince (1532, Niccolo Machiavelli) : banned books; title: Atlas, or, Cosmographic meditations (1585-95, Gerard Mercator) : the Mercator projection; title: Don Quixote (1605-15, Miguel de Cervantes) : the legacy of Don Quixote; title: First folio (1623, William Shakespeare) : comedies, histories and tragedies; title: An anatomical study of the motion of the heart and blood in animals (1628, William Harvey) : the University of Padua; title: Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems (1632, Galileo Galilei) : Galileo and the telescope; title: Principia mathematica (1687, Isaac Newton); title: A dictionary of the English language (1755, Samuel Johnson) : Johnsonisms; title: The sorrows of young Werther (1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) : Goethe and Ossian; title: The wealth of nations (1776, Adam Smith) : the industrial revolution; title: Common sense (1776, Thomas Paine) : a tale of two revolutions; title: Lyrical ballads (1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) : two modern romantics; title: Pride and prejudice (1813, Jane Austen) : two literary traditions; title: A Christmas carol (1843, Charles Dickens) : rescuing Christmas; title: The Communist manifesto (1848, Karl Marx) : a ten-point plan; title: Moby-Dick (1851, Herman Melville) : "the great American novel"; title: Uncle Tom's cabin (1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe) : the slaves' own stories; title: Madame Bovary (1857, Gustave Flaubert) : romanticism, realism and naturalism; title: On the origin of species (1859, Charles Darwin); title: On liberty (1859, John Stuart Mill) : utilitarianism; title: War and peace (1869, Leo Tolstoy) : Tolstoy the soldier; title: The telephone directory (1878, New Haven District Telephone Company) : the first telephone; title: The thousand and one nights (1885, translated by Sir Richard Burton); title: A study in scarlet (1888, Arthur Conan Doyle) : Holmes's predecessors; title: The interpretation of dreams (1899, Sigmund Freud) : Freud and surrealism; title: The protocols of the elders of Zion (1905) : Mein Kampf; title: Poems (1920, Wilfred Owen) : the Somme; title: Relativity: the special and the general theory (1920, Albert Einstein) : Einstein and the bomb; title: Ulysses (1922, James Joyce) : a modernist poem; title: Lady Chatterley's lover (1928, D.H. Lawrence) : obscenity trials; title: The general theory of employment, interest, and money (1936, John Maynard Keynes) : the Great Depression; title: If this is a man (1947, Primo Levi) : Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the Gulag Archipelago; title: Nineteen eighty-four (1949, George Orwell) : George Orwell meets Big Brother; title: The second sex (1949, Simone de Beauvoir) : Mary Wollstonecraft; title: The catcher in the rye (1951, J.D. Salinger) : the ducks in Central Park; title: Things fall apart (1958, Chinua Achebe) : the dark continent; title: Silent spring (1962, Rachel Carson) : the environmental movement; title: Quotations from Chairman Mao (1964, Mao Zedong) : the cult of personality; title: Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone (1997, J.K. Rowling) : school fiction; title: Index.