The Annals/The Histories
10 best books like The Annals/The Histories (Tacitus): The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and Sophists, Naguib Mahfouz: Three Novels of Ancient Egypt, Psychology: The Briefer Course, Shirley & The Professor, The Complete Henry Bech, Plays, Prose Writings and Poems, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The Geometry of René Descartes: with a Facsimile of the First Edition, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World, The Landmark Julius Caesar: The Complete Works
| Author | Robin Waterfield |
| ISBN | 0192824546 |
Aristotle said that philosophy begins with wonder, and the first Western philosophers developed theories of the world which express simultaneously their sense of wonder and their intuition that the world should be comprehensible. But their enterprise was by no means limited to this proto-scientific...
| Author | Naguib Mahfouz |
| ISBN | 1841593052 |
Mahfouz reaches back thousands of years to bring us tales from his homeland's majestic early history—tales of the Egyptian nobility and of war, star-crossed love, and the divine rule of the pharoahs. In Khufu's Wisdom, the legendary Fourth Dynasty monarch faces the prospect of the end of his rule...
| Author | William James |
| ISBN | 0486416046 |
William James’s monumental Principles of Psychology has long been on my to-read list. But I have a nasty habit of letting books scare me; and a 1,400-page textbook from 1890 was sufficiently intimidating to make me put it off indefinitely.
To warm up to the task, I decided to read a couple...
| Author | Charlotte Brontë |
| ISBN | 0307268217 |
Shirley is the story of a complicated friendship between two very different women: shy and socially constrained Caroline, the poor niece of a tyrannical clergyman; and the independent heiress Shirley, who has both the resources and the spirit to defy convention. The romantic entanglements of the...
| Author | John Updike |
| ISBN | 1857152646 |
From his birth in 1923 to his belated paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in 1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next. By turns cynical and naïve, wry and avuncular,...
| Author | Oscar Wilde |
| ISBN | 1857150422 |
Brilliant and tragic, decadent yet radical, a socialist dandy and a witty moralist, Oscar Wilde embodied all the contradictions of the 1890s. The scope of his genius is indicated in this volume by the inclusion of the period’s most scintillating comedy – The Importance of Being Earnest; its most...
| Author | H.G. Wells |
| ISBN | 0307593843 |
Gathered together in one hardcover volume: three timeless novels from the founding father of science fiction.
The first great novel to imagine time travel, The Time Machine (1895) follows its scientist narrator on an incredible journey that takes him finally to Earth’s last moments—and...
| Author | René Descartes |
| ISBN | 0486600688 |
This is an unabridged republication of the definitive English translation of one of the very greatest classics of science. Originally published in 1637, it has been characterized as "the greatest single step ever made in the progress of the exact sciences" (John Stuart Mill); as a book which "remade...
| Author | Johannes Kepler |
| ISBN | 1573920363 |
The brilliant German mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), one of the founders of modern astronomy, revolutionized the Copernican heliocentric theory of the universe with his three laws of motion: that the planets move not in circular but elliptical orbits, that their speed is greatest when...
| Author | Gaius Julius Caesar |
| ISBN | 0307377865 |
Gallic War - Civil War - Alexandrian War - African War - Spanish War
Between 58 and 50 B.C., Caesar led his army to twice invade Britain and conquer most of the land that is now France, Belgium, and Switzerland. The Gallic Wars served two purposes: to offer a record of Caesar's travels and insights...
Passions of the Renaissance
And now volume three. My reviews of the first two books in this series have garnered a fat total of 0 votes, positive or negative, so I'll make this review brief.
This book charts the transistion from the middle ages to the beginnings of the modern period. In the introduction by Aries (who's scholarship...
| Author | Plutarch |
| ISBN | 0375756779 |
Plutarch's Lives, written at the beginning of the second century A.D., is a brilliant social history of the ancient world by one of the greatest biographers and moralists of all time. In what is by far his most famous and influential work, Plutarch reveals the character and personality of his subjects...
| Author | Abraham Lincoln |
| ISBN | 0486435431 |
Nominated in 1858 by the infant Republican party to oppose Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln challenged the incumbent Democratic senator from Illinois to a series of debates. This volume contains their masterful arguments as well as two speeches, one by each candidate. Paving the way for modern...
A Study of History, Abridgement of Vols 7-10
| Author | Arnold Joseph Toynbee |
| ISBN | 0195050819 |
Acknowledged as one of the greatest achievements of modern scholarship, Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History is a ten-volume analysis of the rise and fall of human civilizations. Contained in two volumes, D.C. Somervell's abridgement preserves the method, atmosphere, texture, and, in many instances,...
| Author | Simon Price |
| ISBN | 0670022470 |
An innovative and intriguing look at the foundations of Western civilization from two leading historians.
The influence of ancient Greece and Rome can be seen in every aspect of our lives. From calendars to democracy to the very languages we speak, Western civilization owes a debt to these classical...
| Author | Denis de Rougemont |
| ISBN | 0691013934 |
In this classic work, often described as "The History of the Rise, Decline, and Fall of the Love Affair," Denis de Rougemont explores the psychology of love from the legend of Tristan and Isolde to Hollywood. At the heart of his ever-relevant inquiry is the inescapable conflict in the West between marriage...
| Author | Alan Ryan |
| ISBN | 0871404656 |
Both a history and an examination of human thought and behavior spanning three thousand years, On Politics thrillingly traces the origins of political philosophy from the ancient Greeks to Machiavelli in Book I and from Hobbes to the present age in Book II. Whether examining Lord Acton’s dictum...
Pliny’s Natural History is an astonishingly ambitious work that ranges from astronomy to art and from geography to zoology. Mingling acute observation with often wild speculation, it offers a fascinating view of the world as it was understood in the first century AD, whether describing the danger...
| Author | Edith Hall |
| ISBN | 0393351165 |
The ancient Greeks invented democracy, theater, rational science, and philosophy. They built the Parthenon and the Library of Alexandria. They wrote down the timeless myths of Odysseus and Oedipus, and the histories of Leonidas’s three hundred Spartans and Alexander the Great. But understanding...
| Author | Tristram Hunt |
| ISBN | 0805080252 |
A remarkable new biography from one of Britain’s leading young historians that recovers the co-founder of communism from the shadows of history
Friedrich Engels is one of the most intriguing and contradictory figures of the nineteenth century. Born to a prosperous Prussian mercantile...
