About the Book
In Books that Changed the World Andrew Taylor sets himself the challenging task of choosing and profiling the fifty most important and influential books in the history of the world. He has selected books from every field of human creativity and intellectual endeavour - from poetry to politics, from fiction to philosophy, from theology to anthropology, and from economics to physics - to create a rounded and satisfying picture of how 50 towering achievements of the human intellect have built our societies, shaped our values, enhanced our understanding of the nature of the world, enabled technological advancements, and reflected our concerns and dilemmas, strengths and failings. In a series of engaging and lively essays, Andrew Taylor sets each work and its author firmly in historical context, summarizes the content of the work in question, and explores its wider influence and legacy. A fascinating and richly informative read, and a clarion call to delve deeper into the library of great books, Books that Changed the World is an thought-provoking and stimulating read, and the likely cause of many an impassioned debate.
Table of Contents:
Introduction. The Iliad, c. 8th century BC, Homer - The Iliad in English. The Histories, 5th century BC, Herodotus - True lies. The Analects, 5th century BC, Confucius - Confucius goes global. The Republic, 4th century BC, Plato - Into the light. The Bible, 2nd century BC-2nd century AD - The King James Bible. Odes, 23-13 BC, Horace. Geographia, c. AD 100-170, Ptolemy - The almagest. Kama Sutra, 2nd or 3rd century AD, Mallanaga Vatsyayana - Eroticism in stone. The Qur'an, 7th century - Translating the Qur'an. Canon of Medicine, 1025, Avicenna - Fathers of medicine. The Canterbury Tales, 1380s-90s, Geoffrey Chaucer - Chaucer's 24 pilgrims' tales. The Prince, 1532, Niccolo Machiavelli - Banned books. Atlas, or, Cosmographic Meditations, 1585-95, Gerard Mercator - The Mercator projection. Don Quixote, 1605-15, Miguel de Cervantes - The legacy of Don Quixote. First Folio, 1623, William Shakespeare - Comedies, histories and tragedies. An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals, 1628, William Harvey - the University of Padua. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 1632, Galileo Galilei - Galileo and the telescope. Principia mathematica, 1687, Isaac Newton. A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, Samuel Johnson - Johnsonisms. The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - Goethe and Ossian. The Wealth of Nations, 1776, Adam Smith - The Industrial Revolution. Common Sense, 1776, Thomas Paine - A tale of two revolutions. Lyrical Ballads, 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Two modern Romantics. Pride and Prejudice, 1813, Jane Austen - Two literary traditions. A Christmas Carol, 1843, Charles Dickens - Rescuing Christmas. The Communist Manifesto, 1848, Karl Marx - A ten-point plan. Moby-Dick, 1851, Herman Melville - "The Great American Novel". Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe - The slaves' own stories. Madame Bovary, 1857, Gustave Flaubert - Romanticism, Realism and Naturalism. On the Origin of Species, 1859, Charles Darwin. On Liberty, 1859, John Stuart Mill - Utilitarianism. War and Peace, 1869, Leo Tolstoy - Tolstoy the soldier. The Telephone Directory, 1878, New Haven District Telephone Company - The first telephone. The Thousand and One Nights, 1885, translated by Sir Richard Burton. A Study in Scarlet, 1888, Arthur Conan Doyle - Holmes' predecessors. The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899, Sigmund Freud - Freud and Surrealism. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 1905 - Mein Kampf. Poems, 1920, Wilfred Owen - The Somme. Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, 1920, Albert Einstein - Einstein and the bomb. Ulysses, 1922, James Joyce - A Modernist poem. Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1928, D.H. Lawrence - Obscenity trials. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936, John Maynard Keynes - The Great Depression. If This is a Man, 1947, Primo Levi - Alexander Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago. Nineteen Eighty-four, 1949, George Orwell - George Orwell meets Big Brother. The Second Sex, 1949, Simone de Beauvoir - Mary Wollstonecraft. The Catcher in the Rye, 1951, J.D. Salinger - The ducks in Central Park. Things Fall Apart, 1958, Chinua Achebe - The Dark Continent. Silent Spring, 1962, Rachel Carson - The environmental movement. Quotations from Chairman Mao, 1964, Mao Zedong - The cult of personality. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, 1997, J.K. Rowling - School fiction. Index. Picture Credits and Acknowledgements.
About the Author :
Andrew Taylor has worked as a journalist in television, newspapers and magazines in Britain and the Middle East and is a regular columnist for the Sunday Times. His authorial credits include The World of Gerard Mercator and A Plum in Your Mouth.
