The Portable Voltaire
10 best books like The Portable Voltaire (Voltaire): Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History: 1585-1828, The Debate on the Constitution, Part 2: Federalist and Anti-Federalist Speeches, Articles, and Letters During the Struggle over Ratification: January to August 1788, Writings: The Autobiography / Poor Richard’s Almanack / Bagatelles, Pamphlets, Essays & Letters, Writings, Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975, The Thomas Paine Reader, Prose and Poetry: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets / The Red Badge of Courage / Stories, Sketches, Journalism, The Black Riders / War Is Kind, The Major Works, The Portable Enlightenment Reader, The Portable Oscar Wilde
| Author | Walter A. McDougall |
| ISBN | 0060957557 |
A powerful reinterpretation of the founding of America by a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian.
The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years," states Walter McDougall in his preface to Freedom Just Around the Corner. With this statement...
In this Library of America volume (and its companion) is captured, on a scale unmatched by any previous collection, the extraordinary energy and eloquence of our first national political campaign.
Part Two gathers collected press polemics and private commentaries from January to August...
| Author | Benjamin Franklin |
| ISBN | 0940450291 |
Note: When first issued, the Library of America edition of Franklin's Writings was collected in one large volume; later, it was published as two separate volumes.
The library of America is dedicated to publishing America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes,...
For two centuries, George Washington has stood “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” universally acknowledged as the one indispensable founder of the American republic. This Library of America volume—the most extensive and authoritative one-volume collection...
Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975
| Author | Milton J. Bates |
| ISBN | 1883011906 |
Some of these pieces are very powerful. Others show how journalism is often, in the end, an ephemeral art.
One passage I highlighted on the horror of the war, from a 1967 New Republic story.
"But the newest weapon of them all, and in its own way, the most incredibly impressive for all its...
| Author | Thomas Paine |
| ISBN | 0140444963 |
This major collection demonstrates the extent to which Thomas Paine (1737—1809) was an inspiration to the Americans in their struggle for independence, a passionate supporter of the French Revolution and perhaps the outstanding English radical writer of his age. It contains all of Paine's key...
| Author | Stephen Crane |
| ISBN | 0940450178 |
This Library of America volume shows why Stephen Crane has come to be recognized as one of the most innovative and diversely talented writers of his generation, even though he died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight. This comprehensive collection includes all his most accomplished and best-known...
At long last I completed reading Milton’s The Major Works, a tome that I’ve been working on for a month, finding it to be alternately interesting and boring, excellently organized, progressing sequentially through Milton’s shorter poetry, his prose writings - mostly political - , “Paradise...
| Author | Isaac Kramnick |
| ISBN | 0140245669 |
The Age of Enlightenment of the 18th century, also called the Age of Reason, was so named for an intellectual movement that shook the foundations of Western civilization. In championing radical ideas such as individual liberty and an empirical appraisal of the universe through rational inquiry and...
| Author | Oscar Wilde |
| ISBN | 0140150935 |
I managed to get through about a third of "The Critic as Artist," the two plays, Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest, his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, about one-fifth of "De Profundis" which is the amazingly (amazingly) long letter to his ex-boyfriend, and some of his poems. What an interesting...
Pages from the Goncourt Journals
No evocation of Parisian life in the second half of the nineteenth century can match that found in the journals of the brothers Goncourt
The journal of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century French literature, a work that in its richness of...
| Author | Isaac Babel |
| ISBN | 0393328244 |
Finally in paperback, this "monumental collection; gathers all of Babel's deft and brutal writing, including a wide array of previously unavailable material, from never-before-translated stories to plays and film scripts" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times). Reviewing the work in The New Republic,...
| Author | Thomas Aquinas |
| ISBN | 0140436324 |
In his reflections on Christianity, Saint Thomas Aquinas forged a unique synthesis of ancient philosophy and medieval theology.
Preoccupied with the relationship between faith and reason, he was influenced both by Aristotle's rational world view and by the powerful belief that wisdom and...
The Portable Thomas Jefferson
| Author | Thomas Jefferson |
| ISBN | 0140150803 |
You're not going to find me recommending the portable Nietzsche, but this edition works for students and scholars. You not only get the notes on the State of Virginia, the Declaration of Independence complete with the parts edited out by others (it's from his Autobiography, if I remember correctly),...
| Author | Plato |
| ISBN | 0140150404 |
Writing in the fourth century B.C., in an Athens that had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Plato formulated questions that have haunted the moral, religious, and political imagination of the West for more than 2,000 years: what is virtue? How should we love? What constitutes...
| Author | Gore Vidal |
| ISBN | 0767908066 |
From the age of Eisenhower to the dawning of the Clinton era, Gore Vidal’s United States offers an incomparably rich tapestry of American intellectual and political life in a tumultuous period. It also provides the best, most sustained exposure possible to the most wide-ranging, acute, and original...
| Author | Henry David Thoreau |
| ISBN | 0140150315 |
Henry David Thoreau dedicated his life to preserving his freedom as a man and an artist. Nature was the fountainhead of his inspiration and his refuge from what he considered the follies of society. Heedless of his friends’ advice to live in a more orthodox manner, he determinedly pursued his own inner...
I read this as part of a course on Marx and Dialectics. It is important to realize that Marx' communism is not that of any iteration of the Soviet Union, or any other modern "communist" state. This is fundamental political theory. It incorporates the very critical component of history, and utilizes the...
The Complete Essays of Mark Twain
| Author | Mark Twain |
| ISBN | 0306809575 |
Mark Twain is best known as one of this country's finest humorists and novelists. As this collection confirms, he was one of our finest essayists as well. Gathered here in a single volume, these pieces reveal the complete range of this esteemed American writer and contain some of his best, funniest,...
| Author | Albert Camus |
| ISBN | 0691120048 |
Paris is firing all its ammunition into the August night. Against a vast backdrop of water and stone, on both sides of a river awash with history, freedom's barricades are once again being erected. Once again justice must be redeemed with men's blood.
?
Albert Camus (1913-1960) wrote...
From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War
| Author | Philippe Ariès |
| ISBN | 0674400038 |
This has to be my favorite set of essays in the whole series. I began to see the parameters of the modern role of females struggling to get out of the social closet, kind of like Cinderella being forced out of sight only to discover she had the key to freedom in her pocket all along.
I had suspected...
| Author | Jonathan Vankin |
| ISBN | 0760708827 |
Hard to classify this book, as there is as much outright nonfiction as interesting facts. For me, often, the simplest answer in any event is probably the right one, but at the same time I do enjoy reading about unanswered (and often unanswerable) anomalies that often lead to wacko conspiracy theories...
| Author | Geoffrey C. Ward |
| ISBN | 0316735892 |
Great introduction to the history of the American West. For someone like me, who has always been interested in that period of our history, but hadn't read much on the topic, this is a great "first book". The photographs are fantastic. You can spend all day just browsing this book, going back in time via...
