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The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition: A Compendium of Knowledge from the Classical Islamic World

10 best books like The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition: A Compendium of Knowledge from the Classical Islamic World (Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri): Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-Hsi, The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku, Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hô Xuân Huong, Original Letters from India, The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology, The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems, Eugene Onegin and Other Poems, Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century, The Crofter and the Laird: Life on an Hebridean Island, Naples Declared

Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K'ang-Hsi
AuthorKangxi
Manchu Monarch’s Memorable Moments and More

Jonathan Spence has not written any bad books. If you want readable, interesting books about China which take unusual angles, choose any of his. This one, which focuses on the life of the Qing (Manchu) emperor Kang-hsi (now spelled Kangxi) who...
The Spring of My Life and Selected Haiku
AuthorKobayashi Issa
ISBN1570621446
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827), along with Basho and Buson, is considered one of the three greatest haiku poets of Japan, known for his attention to poignant detail and his playful sense of humor. Issa's most-loved work, The Spring of My Life, is an autobiographical sketch of linked prose and haiku in the...
Spring Essence: The Poetry of Hô Xuân Huong
AuthorHồ Xuân Hương
ISBN1556591489
Hồ Xuân Hương — whose name translates as "Spring Essence" — is one of the most important and popular poets in Vietnam. A concubine, she became renowned for her poetic skills, writing subtly risqué poems which used double entendre and sexual innuendo as a vehicle for social, religious, and...
Original Letters from India
AuthorEliza Fay
ISBN1590173368
Eliza Fay’s origins are obscure; she was not beautiful, rich, or outlandishly accomplished. Yet the letters she wrote from her 1779 voyage across the globe captivated E. M. Forster, who arranged for their British publication in 1925. The letters have been delighting readers ever since with their...
The Snoring Bird: My Family's Journey Through a Century of Biology
AuthorBernd Heinrich
ISBN0060742151
From Bernd Heinrich, the bestselling author of Winter World, comes the remarkable story of his father's life, his family's past, and how the forces of history and nature have shaped his own life. Although Bernd Heinrich's father, Gerd, a devoted naturalist, specialized in wasps, Bernd tried to distance...
The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems
AuthorJim Harrison
ISBN1556590954
Astonishing poetry collection. One of the few poets that I read cover to cover and then again few more times, untill I know each poem by heart.

Looking Forward to Age

I will walk down to a marina
on a hot day and not go out to sea.

I will go to bed and get up early,
and carry...
Eugene Onegin and Other Poems
AuthorAlexander Pushkin
ISBN0375406727
Eugene Onegin (1833) is a comedy of manners, written in exquisitely crafted verse, about two young members of the Russian gentry, the eponymous hero and the girl Tatyana, who don't quite connect. It is also the greatest masterpiece of Russian literature—the source of the human archetypes and the...
Down and Delirious in Mexico City: The Aztec Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century
AuthorDaniel Hernandez
ISBN1416577033
MEXICO CITY, with some 20 million inhabitants, is the largest city in the Western Hemisphere. Enormous growth, raging crime, and tumultuous politics have also made it one of the most feared and misunderstood. Yet in the past decade, the city has become a hot spot for international business, fashion,...
The Crofter and the Laird: Life on an Hebridean Island
AuthorJohn McPhee
ISBN1899863249
There was a toast among the clans when they banqueted. A clansman would rise, lift a cup, and say, "To the land of the bens and the glens!" And up from the food the faces would move, and every man would roar out, "To the land of the bens and the glens!"

Och, a toast to start.

Our current President...
Naples Declared
AuthorBenjamin Taylor
ISBN0399159177
It is a city of seemingly irreconcilable opposites, simultaneously glorious and ghastly. And it is Ben Taylor’s remarkable ability to meld these contradictions into a whole that makes this the exciting and original book it is. He takes his stroll around the bay with the acute sensitivity of a lover,...
Enemies of Promise
AuthorCyril Connolly
ISBN0892550783
An enduring classic by one of England's finest critics, on why so many gifted writers fall short of attaining greatness.
Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.--Cyril Connolly
Cyril Connolly (1903-1974) was one of the most influential book reviewers and critics in England,...
A Russian Gentleman
AuthorSergei Aksakov
ISBN0192815733
At the center of this chronicle of Russian provincial life in the reign of Catherine the Great stands the patriarchal figure of the author's grandfather, Stepan Mikhailovich. A man of great natural dignity, imbued with respect for tradition and love of the land, he is also despotic and virtually illiterate....
Sky Above, Great Wind: The Life and Poetry of Zen Master Ryokan
AuthorRyōkan
ISBN1590309820
Ryokan (1758–1831) is, along with Dogen and Hakuin, one of the three giants of Zen in Japan. But unlike his two renowned colleagues, Ryokan was a societal dropout, living mostly as a hermit and a beggar. He was never head of a monastery or temple. He liked playing with children. He had no dharma heir....
History of My Life, Vols. I & II
AuthorGiacomo Casanova
ISBN0801856620
In volumes 1 and 2, Casanova tells the story of his family, his first loves, and his early travels. With the death of his grandmother, he is sent to a seminary--but is soon expelled. He is briefly imprisoned in the fortress of Sant' Andrea. After wandering from Naples to Rome in search of a patron, he enters...
The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry
AuthorRobert Chandler
An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and...
South from Granada: A Sojourn in Southern Spain
AuthorGerald Brenan
The First World War had a powerful effect on many of its participants; Gerald Brenan was one of those. Brenan came from an Anglo-Irish military family. He had the usual public school education, hated it and was bullied. He was expected to go into the army, but at 18 elected instead to walk to China with a...
Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
AuthorGustave Flaubert
ISBN0140435824
At once a classic of travel literature and a penetrating portrait of a “sensibility on tour,” Flaubert in Egypt wonderfully captures the young writer’s impressions during his 1849 voyages. Using diaries, letters, travel notes, and the evidence of Flaubert’s traveling companion, Maxime...
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, Revised Edition, with a New Preface
AuthorRoss E. Dunn
ISBN0520243854
When I met Professor Dunn, he was already being called America's foremost authority on Ibn Battuta. As we discussed our mutually favored subject, I will never forget how he commented, "I believe I can say that I know just how a Maliki scholar in the 14th century would think."

Ibn Battuta's name...
The Devil's Broker: Seeking Gold, God, and Glory in Fourteenth- Century Italy
AuthorFrances Stonor Saunders
ISBN0060777303
A vibrant history of Italy in the cataclysmic fourteenth century as seen through the life of a brilliant military strategist and bandit lord

At the dawn of the Renaissance, hordes of mercenaries swooped down on the opulent city-states of Italy and commenced to drain them dry. The greatest...
Faces of Love
AuthorHafez
ISBN0143107283
Acclaimed translator Dick Davis breathes new life into the timeless works of three masters of fourteenth-century Persian literature.

Together, Hafez, a giant of world literature; Jahan Malek Khatun, an eloquent princess; and Obayd-e Zakani, a dissolute satirist, represent one of the...
China: A Macro History
AuthorRay Huang
ISBN1563247313
A (content-wise) interesting thematic history of China, albeit one that shows its age. It's too dry to be a popular history, but does too little to situate itself in within contemporaneous scholarship to be academic.

As its title suggests, Huang's book is a macro-level treatment of Chinese...
The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton
AuthorFawn M. Brodie
ISBN0393301664
Starting in a hollowed log of wood—some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself "Why?" and the only echo is "damned fool! . . . the Devil drives!"


So Richard Francis Burton, preparing for an exploration of the lower Congo in 1863, wrote to Monckton...
Essays in Idleness and Hôjôki
AuthorYoshida Kenkō
ISBN0141192100
These two works on life's fleeting pleasures are by Buddhist monks from medieval Japan, but each shows a different world-view. In the short memoir Hojoki, Chomei recounts his decision to withdraw from worldly affairs and live as a hermit in a tiny hut in the mountains, contemplating the impermanence...
Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction
AuthorRichard Tuck
ISBN0192802550
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was the first great English political philosopher, and his book Leviathan was one of the first truly modern works of philosophy. Richard Tuck shows that while Hobbes may indeed have been an atheist, he was far from pessimistic about human nature, nor did he advocate totalitarianism....
First Footsteps in East Africa
AuthorRichard Francis Burton
ISBN1428017305
Chock full of ethnographical information about the Muslims of Somalia, Richard Burton's "First Footsteps in Africa" is a great look at a white man's first forays into that area of the continent. As an adventure novel, the book is kind of dry -- Burton essentially travels to an area, is held there by its...
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