Great Books
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche called it the deepest book ever given to mankind and had part of it printed for forty friends. Most readers find it maddening. Both things are true.
Notes from Underground
A man talking at you from a basement, daring you to like him, and refusing every offer of sympathy in advance. The first genuinely modern voice in fiction.
The Good War
Terkel put the phrase in quotation marks and meant them. A hundred and twenty-one people describe the war they were actually in, which is not the one in the films.
How To Read A Book
The best argument ever made that reading is a skill you can be bad at without knowing it. Most educated adults, Adler thought, stopped improving at fourteen.
Clash of Civilizations
The most argued-over book in modern international relations, and the one most often cited by people who have not read it. Huntington asked what would organise the world once ideology...
The Master and Margarita
Bulgakov burned the first draft, started again, and was still correcting it weeks before he died. It reached the public a quarter of a century later and Russia has never...