A crash course in wisdom
Discover the best books for a crash course in wisdom. Explore essential reads that offer profound insights, life lessons, and timeless knowledge to elevate your thinking and decision-making.
Book
Complete Poems and Plays
by Thomas Stearns Eliot
For contents and other editions, see Author Catalog.
Book
Moby-Dick, Or, The Whale
by Herman Melville
A classic of the sea, telling of the pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who defied capture.
Item Not Found
ID: 0393044726
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0192834169
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0486278026
(Type: books)
Book
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956
by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's attempt to compile a literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labor camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 and that underwent an enormous expansion during the rule of Stalin from 1924 to 1953. Various sections of the three volumes describe the arrest, interrogation, conviction, transportation, and imprisonment of the Gulag's victims by Soviet authorities over four decades. The work mingles historical exposition and Solzhenitsyn's own autobiographical accounts with the voluminous personal testimony of other inmates that he collected and committed to memory during his imprisonment.Upon publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn was immediately attacked in the Soviet press. Despite the intense interest in his fate that was shown in the West, he was arrested and charged with treason on February 12, 1974, and was exiled from the Soviet Union the following day.
Book
Notes from Underground; the Double
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
‘It is best to do nothing! The best thing is conscious inertia! So long live the underground!’Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator of Dostoyevsky’s groundbreaking Notes from Underground tells the story of his tortured life. With bitter sarcasm, he describes his refusal to become a worker in the ‘ant-hill’ of society and his gradual withdrawal to an existence ‘underground’. The seemingly ordinary world of St Petersburg takes on a nightmarish quality in The Double when a government clerk encounters a man who exactly resembles him – his double perhaps, or possibly the darker side of his own personality. Like Notes from Underground, this is a masterly study of human consciousness.Jessie Coulson’s introduction discusses the stories’ critical reception and the themes they share with Dostoyevksy’s great novels.
Item Not Found
ID: 0451527798
(Type: books)
Book
The Prince
by Niccolo Machiavelli
Here is the world's most famous master plan for seizing and holding power. Astonishing in its candor The Prince even today remains a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince . . . a king . . . a president. When, in 1512, Machiavelli was removed from his post in his beloved Florence, he resolved to set down a treatise on leadership that was practical, not idealistic. In The Prince he envisioned would be unencumbered by ordinary ethical and moral values; his prince would be man and beast, fox and lion. Today, this small sixteenth-century masterpiece has become essential reading for every student of government, and is the ultimate book on power politics.
Item Not Found
ID: 0486268772
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0140440100
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0762401788
(Type: books)
Item Not Found
ID: 0140707166
(Type: books)