Great Ideas
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Great Ideas is a book series published by Penguin Books. It consists of multiple series of twenty books, each about a hundred pages long. Every book contains a famous essay, often by an even more famous writer. Some of these are mildly shortened. As of October 2006 two series have been published. Recent reprints show that Penguin is moving to remove the distinction between the two series, suggesting either that future titles will be published ad hoc or that no more new titles are planned.
[edit] The first series
- 1. Seneca - On the Shortness of Life
- 2. Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
- 3. St. Augustine - Confessions of a Sinner
- 4. Thomas à Kempis - The Inner Life
- 5. Niccolò 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 the 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
[edit] The Second Series
- 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 Devine & The Book of Job
- 27. Marco Polo - Travels in the Land of Kubilai Khan
- 28. Christine de Pizan - The City of Ladies
- 29. Baldassare 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 & Idolatry
- 34. David Hume - On Suicide
- 35. Carl von 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 - Conspicious Consumption
- 39. Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus
- 40. Hannah Arendt - Eichmann and the Holocaust