12 Books that Changed the World

These are the 12 books that Melvyn Bragg thought changed the world in a dramatic way. There were many other books he had to leave off the list. As you can see, some of these are on the 50 Greatest Books List I just completed. Others are not on that list. The bold titles in the list below are NOT in the 50 Greatest Books series. I will attempt to find more information about those books.




Darwin - The Origin of Species (1859)
The First Rule Book of the Football Association (1863)
William Shakespeare's First Folio (1623)
Newton - Principia Mathematica (1687)
Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations (1776)
William Wilberforce - Speech to the House of Commons (May 12 1789)
The King James Bible (1611)
Patent Specification for Arkwright's Spinning Machine (1769)
Mary Wollstonecraft - A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Michael Faraday - Experimental Research in Electricity (1855)
Marie Stopes - Married Love (1918)
Magna Carta (1215)


Bragg also made a TV series about these books.
Here is the Football Association Rules Book clip.



Part 1 - 10 Minutes


Part 2 - 7 Minutes

50 Greatest Books - Fini

Well you will be pleased to know that the entire series has now finished. These are the books that the Globe and Mail Newspaper considers to be the Greatest Books ever written.

1st entry: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
2nd entry: In Search of Lost Time
3rd entry: On the Origin of Species
4th entry: The Divine Comedy
5th entry: The Republic
6th entry: Don Quixote
7th entry: Ulysses
8th entry: Das Kapital
9th entry: The Confessions of St. Augustine
10th entry: Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince
11th entry: The Great Gatsby
12th entry: Middlemarch
13th entry: The Wealth of Nations
14th entry: The Interpretation of Dreams
15th entry: Gulliver's Travels
16th entry: One Hundred Years of Solitude
17th entry: King Lear
18th entry: The Critique of Pure Reason
19th entry: Pride and Prejudice
20th entry: The Iliad and The Odyssey
21st entry: The Brothers Karamazov
22nd entry: T. S. Eliot's Collected Poems, 1909-1962
23rd entry: Lolita,
24th entry: The Koran
25th entry: Our Mutual Friend
26th entry: Ficciones
27th entry: The Histories, by Herodotus
28th entry: Moby-Dick
29th entry: Madame Bovary
30th entry: Kafka's The Complete Stories
31st entry: The King James Bible
32nd entry: Principia Mathematica
33rd entry: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
34th entry: Galileo's Dialogue
35th entry: The Theban Trilogy
36th entry: The Mahabharata
37th entry: Alice in Wonderland
38th entry: The Social Contract
39th entry: Essays
40th entry: Faust
41st entry: Silent Spring
42nd entry: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
43rd entry: Anton Chekhov's Stories
44th entry: War and Peace
45th entry: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
46th entry: The Decameron
47th entry: Waiting for Godot
48th entry: The Tale of Genji
49th entry: Diderot's Encyclopedia
50th entry: Portrait of a Lady

I have not linked to the earlier books in the list because those reviews are only partial. You have to PAY (Globe and Mail) to read them in full.


The Globe and Mail have also made the following statement.
December 20, 2008

This issue of Books will be its last in stand-alone form.

Beginning Jan. 10, 2009, Books will have a new home, in print and on the web. We'll be part of a Focus & Books section every Saturday with the same authoritative survey of the Canadian literary scene, along with descriptions of our new online content.

We're taking the next two weeks off to retool so that we continue to bring you not only the sharp and insightful reviews and features you have come to expect, but some new and, we hope, exciting ones.

Our new web presence will have even more offerings, containing not only everything from the Saturday section, but many web-only features, including a daily book review, blogs, an archive of past reviews, podcasts and video.

Portrait of a Lady - 50 Greatest Books

Portrait of a Lady
By Henry James
Review by COLM TÓIBÍN
Globe and Mail
December 20, 2008

Henry James used everything he knew, including his own complex self, when he wrote The Portrait of a Lady.



He dramatized his own interest in freedom against his own egotism, his own bright charm against the darker areas of his imagination.

He also used the ghost of his young cousin, Minny Temple, who had died in 1870.

He wrote to a friend who believed his heroine in the book, Isabel Archer, was a direct portrait of Minny: "Poor Minny was essentially incomplete and I have attempted to make my young woman more rounded, more finished.
"In truth everyone, in life, is incomplete, and it is [in] the work of art that in reproducing them one feels the desire to fill them out, to justify them, as it were."

In 1878, James had published Daisy Miller, a tale of a spirited young American woman in Italy who was punished for breaking the rules.

And also, a tale called An International Episode, in which another spirited young American woman was, to the surprise of her English friends, not in search of a rich husband, or any husband at all; she sought something more interesting from life than the mere prospect of money and rank.

The idea of creating a great female character loomed large in James's imaginative ambitions as the 1870s progressed.

When he came to write his preface to The Portrait of a Lady a quarter of a century after it was published, James insisted that the novel, which has a dark and fascinating plot, had not come to him first as a plot, "but altogether in the sense of a single character, the character and aspect of a particular engaging young woman."

As he wrote his preface, he was alert to the idea that a young woman as the central subject of a work of art had to be defended, or at least explained.

He appealed to the example of George Eliot, to her placing female characters such as Hetty Sorrel, Maggie Tulliver, Rosamond Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth at the very centre of her novels, remarking how difficult the task was, so difficult indeed that "Dickens and Walter Scott, as for instance even, in the main, so subtle a hand as R.L. Stevenson, has preferred to leave the task unattempted."

His decision, he wrote, was to "place the centre of the subject in the young woman's consciousness. … Stick to that — for the centre. … Press least hard, in short, on the consciousness of your heroine's satellites, especially the male; make it an interest contributive only to the greater one."

He used imagery associated with architecture throughout his preface: "On one thing I was determined; that, though I should clearly have to pile brick upon brick for the creation of an interest, I would leave no pretext for saying that anything is out of line, scale or perspective."

Part of the genius of the novel is its structure, its handling of time, its use of small-scale scenes where two or three of the characters dramatize their needs and desires.

Mostly, however, in sequences some of which have considerable intensity and power, we the readers live inside Isabel's tender mind and watch her change and respond; we understand nothing more than she does about what is coming her way.

In this novel, James conjured up real houses; he described the cities of Rome and Florence, which he had come to know and love; he weaved in English manners, which he had, by the time he wrote the book, come to appreciate.

He created a number of minor characters filled with eccentricity, such as the American journalist Henrietta Stackpole, the outspoken and independent Mrs. Touchett and the darkly and elegantly mysterious Madame Merle.

In The Portrait of a Lady, James drew a portrait of an American in Europe who had high ideals, immense charm and considerable moral seriousness.

He dramatized her need for freedom against repression and secrecy and dark restriction.

In concentrating on her fate in the world, her relationship with her cousin Ralph and two other men who wanted her, he created one of the most magnificent figures in the large and sprawling house of fiction.

Colm Tóibín was a finalist for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for his novel about Henry James, "The Master."

L'ENCYCLOPÉDIE - 50 Greatest Books

L'ENCYCLOPÉDIE
EDITED BY DENIS DIDEROT AND JEAN D'ALEMBERT

ANDRÉ ALEXIS MAKES THE CASE
December 13, 2008

l'Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (The Encyclopedia, or systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts and crafts) was published in France between 1751 and 1772. There wasn't enough money to publish it all at once, so its existence depended on subscribers, sales and pleading. One of the earliest European encyclopedias, it was, by 1772, 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of illustrations, edited by the writer Denis Diderot and the great mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert. A wonderful work, it can be approached in a number of ways.

First, as the product of a remarkable generation of French intellectuals. Among its contributors were Jean-Jacques Rousseau (music and political theory), Voltaire (history, literature, philosophy), Montesquieu (on the idea of "taste"), Baron d'Holbach (the sciences, politics, religion) and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (philosophy). Its aim, as set out by d'Alembert in his Preliminary Discourse, was the unveiling of the order within and interconnection among the various forms of human knowledge. Its fundamental idea was to include accounts of the first principles of all the arts, sciences and crafts.

A second approach might begin with The Encyclopedia's chief editor and guiding spirit, Denis Diderot, who is himself fascinating. The Encyclopedia can be seen as the culmination of his industry, idealism and ideals - ideals shared, of course, with many of his contemporaries. Diderot was a novelist of great talent: Jacques le fataliste (Jacques the Fatalist) is his best-known fiction, but Les Bijoux indiscrets (The Indiscreet Jewels), a work he later disowned for its childish elements (it is a novel about a magic ring that allows vaginas to speak), mixes philosophy, pornography, comedy and social satire in a way that is still startling and not without moments of real thoughtfulness. Diderot, a subversive philosopher and a talented art critic to boot, embodies the breadth of curiosity and the intellectual daring and perversity that are the hallmarks of the best of the Enlightenment.

A third approach: Though The Encyclopedia is a repository of the philosophical and religious debates that shaped the Enlightenment, it is more. It's a living document whose entries are sometimes important works of philosophy in themselves. For instance, d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse is a fine introduction to Enlightenment ideas, but it's also a clear, well-written essay in empiricism (the belief that knowledge is derived first from the senses).

Frederick the Great thought d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse greater than any of his own military accomplishments, and he wrote of it: "Many men have won battles and conquered provinces, but few have written a work as perfect as the preface to The Encyclopedia," a sentiment that shows just how in touch with the spirit of his time d'Alembert actually was.

Obviously, not all of The Encyclopedia's entries have the same value today. We know more than the men of the 18th century did about the natural world, and our prejudices are not the same as theirs. We see certain things more clearly than they did. On the other hand, it's hard to think of another encyclopedia (save, maybe, the 1911 Britannica) whose articles - well, some of them - have kept their relevance for so long. The entry on Baruch Spinoza, for example, is a vivid presentation of Spinoza's philosophy, a vigorous critique of his ideas and a sometimes snide account of Spinoza himself.

That entry's liveliness comes from one of Diderot and d'Alembert's main objectives: a deep engagement with ideas and a questioning of received wisdom. Beneath it all is a (radical for the time and, perhaps, still radical) belief that one could return to the "origin" of any idea and sort things out for oneself.

This attitude is at the heart of the Enlightenment's ongoing relevance. Its critics accused the encyclopedists - and Enlightenment thinkers as a whole - of supplanting God with Reason, of placing their faith exclusively in rationality. This is not at all true. As the entry on Spinoza demonstrates, they were heretics of Reason as well, as skeptical about ways of thinking as they were ways of worship. Their iconoclasm was wide-ranging, because their chief enemy was not God or Reason or Government but, rather, authority. The Encyclopedia, in bringing knowledge to the people, allowing a citizen to question the dictates of priests, politicians, scientists and even poets, gave him or her a way to independence of thought.

As philosopher Susan Nieman recently pointed out, in a time when authority can be as brutal and hard of hearing as it was in the 18th century, the example of Diderot, d'Alembert and the encyclopedists is of much more than historical relevance. They have become, again, our contemporaries and The Encyclopedia (still valuable in its abridged versions) is a great place to become reacquainted with dissent.

Contributing reviewer André Alexis's most recent book is the novel Asylum.

The Tale of Genji - 50 Greatest Books

Did Lady Murasaki invent the Novel?
The Tale of Genji
Globe and Mail
December 6, 2008

There are two reasons to read
the 1,000-year-old Japanese novel
The Tale of Genji.
One is that it is very strange.
The other is that it is very familiar.

It is simultaneously a testament to the continuity of human nature and to the unceasing variety of customs and social arrangements that civilizations engender. Reading it is in some ways a challenge, and yet it goes down easily, in a dreamlike way, not quite understandable yet consistently alluring.

Did Murasaki Shikibu (Lady Murasaki) invent the novel in 1000 AD? Let's say she did, since no one but specialists read her rivals (Daphnis and Chloe? The Golden Ass?) while The Tale of Genji is read in Japanese schools as Shakespeare is read in English and North American schools, and has been fully translated into English three times in the past century (by Arthur Waley, Edward Seidensticker and Royall Tyler).

Let's say, further, that she invented two types of novels.

The first, of about 700 out of 1,100 pages, is a biographical novel about "The Shining Genji," a son of the emperor of Japan and one of his low-status concubines.

He is intelligent, graceful and wonderfully good-looking, and sets himself the task, early in his adult life, of knowing and loving as many women as he can (while, of course, maintaining and improving his status at the Heian Emperor's court).

His task is complicated by the fact that most of the women he might come to know are sequestered and unavailable, but his charm and intelligence more or less overcome this difficulty.

He lives to the age of 48 or 50; he marries several times (his society is polygamous); he finds true love; he has several children; he finds wisdom.

It is this last that gives The Tale of Genji its enduring appeal.

Heian Japan (794 to 1185 AD) saw the popularization of Buddhism (which had been introduced in the sixth century).

By the 10th century, there were well-established philosophical and poetic traditions that Lady Murasaki easily drew upon to infuse Genji's career, but also his inner life, with meaning as well as lyrical power.

At one point about halfway into the novel, for example, when Genji is, to all appearances, at the height of fame and power, he and one of his wives discuss whether spring or autumn is to be preferred.

After Genji leaves, the wife reflects: "He brings everything altogether in himself, like a willow that is all of a sudden blooming like a cherry. It sets a person to shivering."

Genji himself is only made more thoughtful and humble by his great career, and in the end dies lamenting his failures and flaws rather than celebrating his successes.

It is this, the author implies, not his looks or his intelligence or his achievements or his high connections, that raises him above all others.

And then, Murasaki Shikibu went on to invent another sort of novel, the much more time-limited and plot-driven tale of Niou and Kaoru, Genji's grandson and great-nephew, who are friends and love rivals.

The plot of this section (about 300 pages) concerns the rivalry and intrigue between the two young men over a pair of sisters, daughters of a nobleman who lives at some distance from the imperial court.

In this section, Murasaki explores the contrasting psychologies of the four main characters and the consequences of their various choices as they attempt to wrestle with their desires and their conflicting loyalties.

As in the earlier section, formalities of birth and inheritance only temporarily veil realities — characters discover that they are not who they thought they were, and that desire often overcomes taboos.

The Tale of Genji was composed like a Dickens novel, in chapters that Lady Murasaki showed to the women of the emperor's court as they were written.

It is therefore similar to a Dickens novel in that characters, adventures and observations proliferate. Some threads are lost track of, others emerge, the whole seems a bit disorganized.

But there is an internal integrity to it all that is made up of Lady Murasaki's overriding interest in what love is and what it feels like, in the progress of seasons and years, in the relationship between the inner life and external circumstances.

Somehow, The Tale of Genji defies the passage of a millennium and invites us to ponder that the more things change, the more they stay the same, while the more they stay the same, the more they change.

Jane Smiley's most recent novel is "Ten Days in the Hills." She is also the author of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel."

Waiting for Godot - 50 Greatest Books

Where nothing happens twice
Keith Garebian
Globe and Mail
November 29, 2008

Tired and worn from "the wasteland of prose" in his fiction trilogy (Murphy, Molloy, Malone Dies), where he tunnelled into his own psyche, Samuel Beckett turned to playwriting as a form of relaxation, sticking to French (as he already was in his novels) as a test of discipline, though the dominant diction of the play is colloquial and imbued with the speech and energy of clochards rather than the sophistications of the French Academy.

Beckett set his play in an unoccupied zone of France during the Second World War, and he was probably awaiting a different world order even as he lamented the destruction of the Paris he had loved in 1939.

So, what was to become a vital turning point in the history of theatre (a piece of writing that would influence almost every major dramatist in English) was created during a period of Beckett's own waiting.

The English title of Waiting for Godot, however, contains an inaccuracy, as critic Eric Bentley pointed out. En Attendant Godot (first published in 1952) hinges on a sense of suspended time.

The title really implies something that transpires while one is waiting or being a creature of deadly habit and routine.

So it is not simply the sheer act of waiting that contributes to the mystery of the piece, but what happens or does not happen in that period.

A critic once remarked that Godot is a two-act play "where nothing happens twice."

This is not literally true, though the play has no story, no plot and not much of a setting: merely a rock, a scrawny tree (that sprouts leaves in the second part to mark the passage of time), a deserted country road and the sky.

Its main characters are two tramps or clowns in bowler hats, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo), who are determined to keep an appointment with a Mr. Godot, who never turns up.

While awaiting this mysterious figure, they talk (sometimes in incomplete parables linked to the Bible), think, indulge in music-hall banter, songs, sight gags, pratfalls, pantomime, rope tricks, farts, smiles, complaints, kicks, sleep and dream.

They salivate, urinate and procrastinate. They take off their shoes, drop their pants, try on hats and attempt suicide.

They encounter a theatrical, sadistic Pozzo and his harried slave, ironically named Lucky.

Pozzo goes blind. Lucky is struck dumb — though not before he delivers an amazing monologue, a parody of academic metaphysics.

In each act, a boy tells the tramps that Godot will not come that day but will surely keep his appointment the next day, and the two men stay and endure the unendurable emptiness.

Who or what is Godot? A common (misguided) tendency is to associate Godot with God, but "God" in French is "Dieu."

Perhaps the name is merely a common French surname (suggested by slang for "boot," godillot, godasse); perhaps the name of the oldest competitor in the annual Tour de France bicycle race.

The question has grown larger than it deserves to be, despite Beckett's insistence that if Godot were God, he would have called him that.

Yet nothing seems to deter some readers from portentous pontifications on the play.

This is partly the effect of Beckett's genius with teasing ambiguity and his ineffable way of expanding the lyrical mood without indulging in stage action.

The play is circular, so it has no beginning and no end — something of a theatrical innovation in itself.

It also has a new tone for its time. The mechanical nature of some of its comic or clowning business is not new (Adamov and Ionesco, for instance, had already exercised that), but what is startling is its expansion of theatre's parameters.

Its language (rooted in Irish banter and song, Scripture and Beckett's own mundane experience) is demotic, scatological and dignified, silly, expository and poetic.

Words become something to be resisted because they stain silence and nothingness, but words are also used like notes in music, to express human malaise in general or to redeem emptiness.

We laugh through tears — as with the best of Chaplin's films — recognizing the basic tragic line of the piece (its metaphysic of nothingness) while enjoying the comic canters and parody.

Beckett's absurdist satire is not as savage as Swift's or as corrosive as Naipaul's. It seems pessimistic on the surface, but it is actually stoical.

I would like to think that the play makes us feel glad to be alive, though I can hear Beckett himself retorting: "I wouldn't go as far as that."

Critic, poet and biographer Keith Garebian won the 2008 Mississauga Arts Award for Writing.

Just a note - Book Number 47 on the list - 3 more to go

The Decameron - 50 Greatest Books

The Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio
1353
Decameron Web
Wikipedia article
Medieval Sourcebook

BY KONRAD EISENBICHLER


'It is a remarkable story that I have to relate. And were it not for the fact that I am one of the many people who saw it with their own eyes, I would scarcely dare to believe it, let alone commit it to paper."

If Dante's Commedia is divine, Boccaccio's Decameron is definitely human. Sweaty, sneaky and at times even slutty, it presents us with a world that operates at the opposite end from the ethereal spheres and rational universe of Dante's masterpiece. Energetic, fast moving, bubbling over with life, this is a world where stupidity, not sin, is punished; where wit, not faith, is rewarded; where sexual pleasure, not chastity, is the object of the game. It has enthralled readers for generations and remains a bestseller to this day.

The Decameron is a collection of 100 tales narrated over the course of 10 days by three young men and seven young women. The premise is that the youths fled the plague ravaging Florence and are now waiting for the contagion to subside by holidaying, as it were, on the hills above the city, moving every day from one villa to the next and entertaining each other with dinner parties, songs, dances and stories.

When Boccaccio was writing The Decameron, the Black Death had, in fact, decimated the population of Florence (1348-49) and was wreaking havoc throughout Europe. Within a generation, a demographic catastrophe of biblical proportions had reduced the continent's population by one third, in some places by a half.

And yet, despite the disaster that was transforming European society forever, Boccaccio depicted a world that was full of life, he presented a cast of resilient characters and told stories that amuse, inspire and even edify the reader.

Many of Boccaccio's characters have become memorable. Andreuccio from Perugia, who foolishly flaunts the cash he has on hand to purchase horses, falls victim to an enterprising prostitute who steals his money and clothes, but eventually he gets his hands on a large jewelled ring and returns home richer than when he started, though not any smarter. A twist of fortune saves the day for him.

Having been caught in bed with her lover, Filippa is brought to court by her offended husband, but with an ingenious explanation, she is able to have the case against her dismissed and the local legislation on adultery altered. Wit wins the day for her.

The unemployed but not unimaginative Masetto from Lamporecchio pretends to be deaf and dumb so as to be hired as the gardener in a nunnery, where he then spends his entire adult life tending to the garden and the nuns, happily capitalizing on the fertility of the convent in more ways than one. Ingenuity is the key to his success.

Boccaccio's characters are resilient individuals who survive by luck, wit or ingeniousness. They represent the bustling world of late medieval Italy, replete with scoundrels and scholars, merchants and monks, nobles and nobodies, all struggling to survive. Optimism colours this mercantile epic where chance and human intelligence intertwine to move life forward in strange and unexpected ways.

But not everyone survives. The Decameron also tells of unfortunate lovers who end rather badly.

When Lisabetta's brothers murder her lover Lorenzo, she finds his body, chops off his head, hides it in a pot of basil and proceeds to water the pot with her tears. When her brothers discover her secret and take the pot away, Lisabetta dies of grief.

When Pasquino accidentally poisons himself and dies, his lover Simona re-enacts the incident for the judge and follows him into the grave.

When Guillaume de Roussillon's wife discovers that her husband has killed her lover and tricked her into eating his heart in a stew, she jumps off the castle's casement to her death.

Boccaccio clearly had a macabre streak in him that, in a grotesque way, makes for captivating reading.

Readers for six centuries have debated the moral of the stories and the purpose of the collection. The discussion will probably continue for another six centuries, to say the least.

Konrad Eisenbichler teaches Renaissance studies at the University of Toronto. He is the prize-winning author of The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411-1785.

Quotable

The two men then held a short consultation, at the close of which they said: "Lo now; we are sorry for thee, and so we make thee a fair offer. If thou wilt join with us in a little matter which we have in hand, we doubt not but thy share of the gain will greatly exceed what thou hast lost." Andreuccio, being now desperate, answered that he was ready to join them. Now Messer Filippo Minutolo, Archbishop of Naples, had that day been buried with a ruby on his finger, worth over five hundred florins of gold, besides other ornaments of extreme value. The two men were minded to despoil the Archbishop ... and imparted their design to Andreuccio, who, cupidity getting the better of caution, approved it; and so they all three set forth. But as they were on their way to the cathedral, Andreuccio gave out so rank an odour that one said to the other: "Can we not contrive that he somehow wash himself a little, that he stink not so shrewdly?"

Translation by J. S. Rigg

...THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN - 50 Greatest Books

Feminism's first manifesto
A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN,
BY MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

CHARLOTTE GRAY MAKES THE CASE
November 15, 2008
Globe and Mail

Watch out, here comes Mary Wollstonecraft - brilliant, bright-eyed and passionate. She's doing that "female" thing that always drives critics up the wall - arguing from the heart not the head - but her ideas are processed through a formidable and original intelligence. The polemic she published in 1792 is rooted in both her own life experience (which included poverty, servitude and a father who was both a lush and a bully) and one of the most dramatic upheavals of European history: the French Revolution. Out of this ferment she moulded the first great feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Much of what Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) championed in Vindication is conventional wisdom for most of us today. She was writing in response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's tract Emile, in which the French philosopher had suggested that a girl's education should focus on making her a useful helpmeet to rational man.

Not so, roared Wollstonecraft, then a 33-year-old literary critic in London. Such an education rendered women useless parasites, whose sense of self-worth arose solely from their appearance and ability to attract men. It produced "gentle domestic brutes" who were "educated in slavish dependence and enervated by luxury and sloth." Some marriages were little more than "legalized prostitution."

What kind of companions, mothers or citizens could women be if they were regarded, both by themselves and by men, as "in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone"? Silken shackles produced the sheer frustration that transformed household angels into domestic tyrants. No, no, no. Women should be educated to think of themselves as autonomous individuals. Only when they achieved a sense of self-respect through the exercise of reason would they be able to put their capacities to good use.

It wasn't a brains-versus-body debate. Wollstonecraft also championed the importance of motherhood in a woman's life, but this made a decent education even more important. If a woman had real intellectual skills, she would be able to support herself and her children if she were widowed, and would be freed from the need to marry or remarry out of financial necessity. Society could not progress if half of its members were held back. The abstract rights of women were inextricably linked, she insisted, with the abstract rights of men that contemporaries like Thomas Paine were busy trumpeting.

Vindication is an eloquent, daring book. Within the tight little circle of thinkers in which Wollstonecraft moved, it created an uproar. It fit the new, pre-Freudian age of enlightenment, when the institutions of religion, monarchy, patriarchy and slavery were all under attack.

So what happened? Where did all that feminist energy go? Why was it nearly a century before women gained access to decent educations? Why was Nellie McClung, Canada's best-known early feminist, still raging in 1913 about women who "sit at home babbling of indirect influence and womanly charm and never doing anything for the betterment of humanity"? Why was the 20th century well advanced before women in the English-speaking world were admitted to full citizenship and given the vote?

Mary Wollstonecraft died in childbirth when she was only 37. She had been working on a book to be called The Wrongs of Women, in which she argued that the best marriages were companionate, and that women should be free to express their sexuality. She had recently married William Godwin, a fellow writer, to legitimize the child they had conceived while living together. After Wollstonecraft's death, the grieving widower wrote a tell-all biography of his beloved, revealing extramarital affairs, suicide attempts and a previous child. Scandalous! By embodying her political principles in her personal life, Wollstonecraft gave her critics the ammunition required to marginalize her. She was reviled as immoral. Fogies like Horace Walpole described whirlwind Mary and her ilk as "hyenas in petticoats." Her ideas were dismissed. Her radical manifesto was swamped by the wave of Victorian conformity.

But Wollstonecraft is not so easily forgotten. The daughter she bore to Godwin was another Mary - Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, an enduringly popular Gothic horror story with a deadly serious theme. John Stuart Mill kept Wollstonecraft's ideas in the progressive mainstream with his 1869 book, The Subjection of Women (probably co-written with his wife, Harriet Tyler Mill).

And Wollstonecraft herself has had her revenge, as Virginia Woolf would exult. "As we ... listen to her arguments ... and realize the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: ... We hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living."

Charlotte Gray is the author, most recently, of a biography of Nellie McClung in the Penguin series Extraordinary Canadians.

*****

Quotable

Men complain, and with reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex, when they do not keenly satirize our headstrong passions and grovelling vices.

Behold, I should answer, the natural effect of ignorance! The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force.

Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives. ... Weakness may excite tenderness, and gratify the arrogant pride of man; but the lordly caresses of a protector will not gratify a noble mind that pants for, and deserves to be respected. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship!

Vindication of the Rights of Women, Chapter 2

War and Peace - 50 Greatest Books

War and Peace
Written By Leo Tolstoy.
Review by Donna Tussing


Two connected events — Russia's defeat in the Crimean War (1853-1856) and the subsequent emancipation of the serfs in 1861 — helped inspire Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1865-69).

Emancipation precipitated a crisis, economic and social, that forced Russians to try to re-invent themselves as a people. Tolstoy, having fought in the war, and fully aware of the challenges posed by emancipation, wrote an epic novel about a pivotal event, the War of 1812, in which the country united to expel a foreign invader.

It is no accident that the novel rallied Russians during the German invasion in the Second World War. For Russians and non-Russians alike, it provides a template for "Russianness" that is as much model as mirror. And at the same time, it has inspired writers of other nationalities, such as India's Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy), to imagine the foundations of their own societies.

War and Peace "speaks to your very gizzard," as philosopher William James put it.

No other historical novel seems so real and so universal. Every character in it — however much a historical and social type, from peasant partisan Shcherbatyi to Napoleon — is also endowed with a psychologically comprehensible inner life. Each, from Princess Marya with her heavy step to General Kutuzov with his waddling one, has a physical presence.

Events are described from the point of view of individuals who participate in them. Readers are along for the ride, body and soul. It takes time to develop such characters and reveal a world through their eyes; hence the novel's great length. To make us concentrate on details in such a long book, Tolstoy divided it into 15 parts, each of which has many, many chapters. The world of the novel is assembled from various sources: personal, literary, historical and even philosophical.

Tolstoy's art evolved out of his early diaries, and in War and Peace, as always, he mined himself for psychological insight. He drew on his own wartime experience (as a newly minted officer like Nikolai Rostov, or an ambitious adjutant like Prince Andrei, or a front-line artillery officer like Captain Tushin).

He debunked romantic versions of war, and to this extent parodied previous literature. But he also learned from such works as the Odyssey, Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma and Alexander Pushkin's The Captain's Daughter. Fantasy plays a large organizing role in the novel, and contributes to its charm.

When Pierre inherits a great fortune; when Andrei, MIA after the Battle of Austerlitz, arrives home for the birth of his son; when Natasha Rostova and Pierre, and then Nikolai and Princess Marya, finally get together — these results satisfy us deeply. They are balanced by tragedies, such as the deaths of several major characters, to keep the novel honest.

To conjure up a past epoch, Tolstoy read thousands of pages of history, memoirs and letters, incorporating large chunks of them into the novel almost unchanged. He exploited family and family history for inspiration: For instance, in early drafts, the Rostovs were Tolstoys. Finally, as the novel expanded during its writing, he developed a controversial and influential philosophy of war and history.

An omniscient narrator guides us through events and between characters. Occasionally, more often in later parts, he breaks out in digressions. The novel has two epilogues, the first divided between fictional narrative and philosophical reflections by the narrator, and the second, all reflection.

The author, Tolstoy, as part of his attempt to write a book with everything in it, from fairy tales to philosophy, allows himself to comment on his own creation through this disembodied voice. The voice can be openly didactic, but it does not subordinate the whole fictional world to itself. The natural and epic resist its moral teaching.

At the end of the novel, Andrei's young son, Prince Nikolenka, still wants to go to war, and Pierre, about to join a conspiracy (the 1825 Decembrist Uprising) that was the original subject of the novel, casts aside the lessons of his earlier disastrous attempt to affect history.

War and Peace is the greatest description ever penned of what modern warfare and a modern army feel like to participants. Combat soldiers find words in it for what they could not previously explain to themselves or others.

The novel has schooled all subsequent war writers in these matters, including Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway. War is hell in it, but hell has benefits for those who must go there. If you want to know why, for good or ill, people will always be willing to fight wars, read War and Peace.

Donna Tussing Orwin teaches Russian literature at the University of Toronto. She is the author and editor of several books on Tolstoy. In April, she was awarded the Pushkin Prize by President Vladimir Putin for contributions to the study of Russian culture and language.

This is entry number 44 for the 50 Greatest Books series. Just 6 more to go.

Anton Chekov - 50 Greatest Authors

Anton Chekhov: The story master
CLAIRE BERLINSKI
Globe and Mail
Toronto
November 1, 2008

This is actually one of the 50 Greatest Books.

"What does Grandma have to say about Chekhov?" Claire asked her brother over the Internet.

Their grandmother woke up at 10 every day, played the piano or, if her legs were strong that day, went downstairs for the mail. She behaved with dignity and severity, and was considered the most cultured person in the family.

"She's dozing," Mischa wrote.
Later, he relayed the question.
"I'm very impressed with him," Grandmother replied. "In a few lines, with a few words, he can create a life, an atmosphere — and recreate his own country."
"Have you read Errand, Raymond Carver's beautiful story about the death of Chekhov?" Mischa asked.
"Like Tchaikovsky creates the country in Eugene Onegin," Grandma added.
"Actually, Carver took most his stories from Chekhov," Claire added. "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love comes directly from About Love."
"We have eight notes in music," Grandma said. "When Tchaikovsky uses them, it's nothing like Strauss.
"When Chekhov writes a story, the people are from a country not anything like America, or France — nothing but Russia."
"This is true!" Claire exclaimed. "Except that when I was reading the stories last night, I was thinking how very much these 19th-century Russians seemed exactly like people I know."

Mischa sat with his grandmother in the drawing room of her apartment in W______ as the stale warmth of midday faintly percolated through the lowered blinds. The opera librettos, the morsel of blueberry muffin still in its wax paper casing, the dish of almonds covered in grey fuzz, all were exactly as they had always been.

"How do you correspond with her?" Grandma asked. "You confound my brain. You get already her answer."
"Mischa, what's your favourite Chekhov story, and why?" Claire wrote.
"Lady with a Lapdog. I love that story."
"What do you think makes it so great?"
"The watermelon."
"The watermelon?"
"Yes, that's the touch of the master."

Claire searched for the passage. The text was accompanied by an advertisement for unlimited long-distance calling.
"It's wrong," she said. "You will be the first to despise me now."
There was a watermelon on the table. Gurov cut himself a slice and began eating it without haste. There followed at least half an hour of silence.
"In any case, I don't think you can say anything new about Chekhov," Mischa wrote. "I think it's sufficient to say the same old things.
"About his sensitivity to humanity — how he doesn't waste a word, you know — he lets the story speak for itself!"
Claire raised her eyes from the glowing computer screen to the window-pane.

Rain clouds were gathering in the east. The gulls stood, wretched, in muddy puddles on the soot-streaked rooftops.
It occurred to her that if this were a story by Chekhov, he wouldn't write, "The weather was depressing." No, he'd describe the squish-squish of the wet overcoats . . .

"These stories are harder to write than they look," she wrote at last.
"That's why he has many imitators, no equals," Mischa responded.
"If this were a story in the style of Chekhov, it would have an inconclusive ending. Because real life doesn't have neat endings.
"In fact, if I wrote an ending, he'd instruct me to cut it," Claire wrote.
"But it has to end at a moment of emotional balance. When you can see forward and backward in life equally, and when the reader is perfectly in the position of the protagonist.
"The reader can't know more, or less, at the end than the protagonist."
"No, that's not true. The reader knows what Chekhov knows, which is a lot more than the protagonist."
"I disagree. Chekhov knows lots more than we do. After all, he invented the characters. He's withholding information. Take Lady with a Lapdog."

And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.

"That's the ending," Mischa wrote. "We have no more idea than the protagonist what will happen next.
"But we've gone from being relative strangers to them to being completely absorbed into their position. They don't know what will happen next, and neither do we."
"But in other stories, like Misery, we see far more than the protagonist!
"Most of his characters fail completely to communicate with each other, but we understand them — because Chekhov does.
"That's the same point Carver makes in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Only the writer really understands."
"Well, all right then!" Mischa replied agreeably. "And mention how David Bezmozgis is the greatest practitioner alive of Chekhovian stories."
"Every short story writer of the 20th century, if he's written a good story, is compared to Chekhov. Even The Sopranos ends with a Chekhovian trailing off . . . "

Mischa reported that Grandma had taken her worn volume of Chekhov from the shelf and was buried nose-deep in it.
The dusty pages of the book were covered, like all her books, in her ornate Central European script.
Claire asked: "What else is happening in W________?"

Claire Berlinski lives in Istanbul. Her new book is "There is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters."

David Hume - 50 Greatest Books

This article is also in the Books section of the Globe and Mail today. The title simply says David Hume. I've never heard of this name so I ignored it. Now I discover that it IS this weeks 50 Greatest Books article.

David Hume: A man for all reasons
BY CHRIS SCOTT


How do we know what we know? What do we know?

To that most lucid of Scottish empiricists, David Hume (1711-1776), the answer to the first question was a straightforward, if deceptively simple, "by experience."

Everything we know about knowing, Hume would argue, is acquired through experience.

Hume was a deadly, if jovial, enemy of creationists. For this reason alone, we should read him today.

In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), a distillation of his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume questioned whether we could know anything a priori, or innately.

A watch may imply the existence of a watchmaker (to use Bishop Paley's famous example), though all such notions, even where they appear self-evident, are based on habit or an association of ideas.

Hume is sometimes called an associationalist, though the word he preferred for his skeptical philosophy was Pyrrhonism — after Pyrrho of Ellis (c. 360-272 BC).

Diogenes Laertius, in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, tells us that Pyrrho, known as "the father of skepticism," so far distrusted the evidence of his senses that he once failed to recognize his tutor, Anaxarchus, floundering in a bog.

Can our senses be trusted to give an accurate picture of the world?

A round tower, seen from a distance, turns out to be square.

What is real?

We see visions all the time, in dreams, under the influence of opiates or when fevered.

Causality itself may be no more than "a habit of mind."

"Things as they are/ Are changed on the blue guitar," Wallace Stevens wrote in The Man with the Blue Guitar, his poetic meditation on Picasso's painting.

What do we know?

To his eternal credit, Hume reminded us that: "The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it."

The second half of this balanced, 18th-century sentence contains a deft Humean jibe against religion.

It is a stiletto-thrust to the vitals of ignoramuses like George W. Bush (Jesus Christ is his favourite "philosopher") and the monstrous dunces on the Kansas Board of Education who hold that a universe incomprehensible to them must be designed by a god.

Hume said that metaphysics tells us everything about invisible worlds, hence enlarging our ignorance. Physics tells us something, but not much, about known worlds.

"That the sun will not rise tomorrow," Hume wrote in Enquiry, "is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more a contradiction than the affirmation, that it will rise." (Hume's italics.)

Reading this, I think of Karl Popper's idea of falsifiability, in which Popper argued that the utility of scientific hypotheses (as opposed to pseudo-scientific hypotheses) is not so much that they can be proved by evidence or experiment, rather that they can be refuted by evidence or experiment.

They may not always conform to experience or even common sense, as in the case of the "Schrödinger's cat" thought-experiment.

Hume, who wrote much about probability, would have enjoyed the paradox: The box containing the cat also contains a phial of potassium cyanide, which may or may not be broken by the spontaneous decay of uranium. Until we open the box, the cat is alive and dead. Simultaneously.

Given Hume's radical skepticism, it is surprising how much evolution, genetics and postclassical physics owe him.

Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg, Watson and Crick — all used methods of inquiry developed by this Scottish contrarian.

Consider the sentence quoted earlier, beginning, "The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind …"

Anyone who doubts that physics claims a more perfect understanding of the universe than metaphysics should read Bruno Maddox's Blinded by Science column in the May, 2008, issue of Discover magazine, in which Maddox takes on how physicists "explain" magnetism.

They don't.

"When you get right down to it," he avers, "these virtual particles [that somehow explain magnetic repulsion and/or attraction] are composed entirely of math and exist solely to fill otherwise embarrassing gaps in physics."

Hume would have smiled at that, I think, with a smile that resembles the Cheshire cat's as much as Schrödinger's — which, of course, is also a frown. Simultaneously.

Novelist Chris Scott philosophizes from St. Joseph Island, Ontario

Silent Spring - 50 Greatest Books

Silent Spring Review
By Tim Flannery
Globe and Mail
October 18, 2008

The 1950s were deeply disturbing times. Our fathers, traumatized yet intoxicated by their victorious wartime power, had turned upon our Earth, unleashing the same chemical and nuclear weapons they had deployed a few short years earlier on their fellow human beings.


So unhinged were the times that serious proposals were advanced by Russian scientists to use nuclear weapons to destroy the Arctic ice cap and so ameliorate the climate of the world.

Canada entertained its own mad schemes. On Feb. 10, 1959, Time magazine reported that the Richfield Oil Corp. planned to explode a series of two-kiloton nuclear weapons below the Alberta tar sands, creating cavities that would fill with liquefied tar.

They claimed that 300 billion barrels of crude oil would be created, and the experts assured everyone that there would be no hazard from radioactivity. As horrifying as this potential misuse of atomic power was, it was the chemical weapons then being aerially sprayed across North America that held the greater danger.

Rachel Carson was a marine biologist who was only reluctantly drawn into researching their impact, and at the time she penned her epic work, she was already suffering from the cancer that would, just two years later, take her life.

She begins Silent Spring with these words: "There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings."

It was the ruthless destruction of that idyll of rural America that formed the basis of a work that has been rightly hailed as giving birth to the modern environmental movement. Carson's ability to make science understandable was formidable.

I have never read as simple or elegant an explanation of chemical composition as she provides for the organochlorides, the group to which the 200-odd chemicals that were then destroying her country belonged. It was not just nature that was suffering.

Carson carefully details many instances of fatal human poisonings. A farmer's wife was poisoned after her husband sprayed. A baby and a small dog died after returning to a house where endrin had been used to kill cockroaches.

In some programs, half the men who sprayed DDT for the World Health Organization suffered convulsions and death. Given that the chemicals are close relatives of the nerve gases developed by the Germans in the Second World War, none of this should have been surprising. The scale of the spraying was enormous: The amount of parathion used annually in California alone was enough, according to one expert, to kill the human population of the world five to 10 times over.

As she researched, Carson received letters from all over the country informing her of the mass death of birds following spraying. She learned that the toxins were accumulating in the reproductive organs of survivors, making them infertile. At times, the destruction was deliberate: In 1959, in southern Indiana, farmers purposely sprayed the roosting site of red-winged blackbirds, killing 65,000, along with uncounted raccoons, rabbits and other life. The destruction did not end on land. In the late 1950s, spraying of forests along the Miramichi River in New Brunswick, to control spruce budworm, devastated the region's salmon run.

Streams all across the continent were being emptied of fish and other life, yet, despite the devastation, neither government nor the corporations manufacturing the toxins showed the least concern. They kept issuing mollifying statements, dismissing concerns as the complaints of nature lovers who were against progress, until Silent Spring exposed them for the merchants of death that they were.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy was that the spraying was ineffective. Yes, it killed pest insects, but it also killed the creatures that held their populations in check. These predators breed more slowly than the pests, so that the year after a spraying, the numbers of pests often increased, and another, more intensive spraying was required.

Long before the development of organochlorides, entomologists knew what the solution to pest infestations was: Increasing ecosystem health by pursuing organic forms of agriculture, and the manipulation of predator insects, provided safe and effective means of controlling pests.

The trouble was that corporations couldn't make fortunes that way. With the illusion of a quick fix, the pesticide companies had set us on a cataclysmic course. We might think that the madness of the 1950s is over, but its effects are still with us, for the poisons remain in our bodies, often passed to us in our mother's milk. Many are immoveable until the moment of our death.

Some of these chemicals are carcinogens, and the elevated rates of some cancers seen in some rural areas today may be caused by them. Others affect fertility, and striking instances of decreases in male fertility, such as documented in Denmark over the past half century, may also result from the spraying of yesteryear.

If Rachel Carson's book has a central message today, it is that every action has its consequences, for in poisoning the world, we poisoned ourselves. For those in the business of unsustainable greed, whether it be in the mortgage business or the tar sands, it's a lesson worth pondering.

Tim Flannery is chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council and author of "The Weather Makers." In 2007, he was named Australian of the Year

This is one book I have not yet read - BUT I must try and do so.

Faust - 50 Greatest Books

FAUST
James M. Skidmore
Globe and Mail
October 11, 2008






Goethe's Faust is a monster. Colossal in artistic and intellectual scope, the play is very long, more than 12,000 lines. A complete performance can take about 21 hours. That's nearly a day sitting in an uncomfortable theatre seat.

Worse, the hero himself is a monster. Heinrich Faust abandons his pregnant lover Gretchen. She, in turn, kills her baby in despair. He also kills her brother and has a hand in her mother's death, and that's just in Part I, the better-known portion of the two-part play. Charming stuff. But still, the play fascinates. Why?

Faust was not received with universal acclaim. A contemporary of Goethe's wrote that if a callous cad like Faust could receive redemption after what he did to Gretchen, then a pig that tramples a flower garden deserves to be the gardener.

But when Germany declared nationhood in 1871, Faust became an emotional benchmark for an ascendant German empire, and the play was hailed as the "second German Bible."

It has since gone beyond Germany's borders and been performed throughout the world. Faust's pact with the devil has attracted writers and readers for centuries. But Goethe's Faust doesn't sell his soul to Mephistopheles, he makes a bet with him: If Faust should reach a point of self-satisfaction, the devil may take his soul.

Faust thinks he has nothing to worry about. A non-believer, he isn't scared by the devil. And having grown weary of the learning to which he has dedicated his life, Faust doesn't believe the devil can give him what he craves: a transcendent moment of fulfilment that makes his existence worthwhile.

But that moment does come. At the end of Part II, Faust utters the fateful words of the bet — "Stay a while! You are so lovely" — when he realizes that his public works are laying the foundation for future prosperity. Mephistopheles wins the bet on a technicality.

However, since Faust's happiness is not self-interested but rather selfless, and the poor devil can't even keep his hands on Faust's soul — angels distract Mephistopheles with their naked behinds — Faust rises into heaven to be reunited with Gretchen. A similar moment occurs in Part I, when Faust discovers sincere and genuine love after a conversation and kiss with the innocent, enchanting Gretchen. The moment is all too fleeting, however.

Faust is sidetracked by Mephistopheles, love turns to lust and, only at the end, as Gretchen sits in a dungeon awaiting her execution, does Faust try to save her. But Gretchen's dignity demands that she accept her guilt, and Faust ends up saving only himself (spoiler alert: God intervenes to redeem Gretchen).

Faust is very much part of the post-Enlightenment discourses of Europe. What was to come after abandoning the church and beheading the French king? In England, applied science and technology ruled the day, and the Industrial Revolution was born. Not so in Germany, where post-Kantian Idealists tried to overcome the divide between subject and object, between self and the world. But Faust is not just an exercise in philosophy. At heart, it is a very human story, drama in the best sense of the word.

Here is a man who is like us: Torn by opposite impulses but wanting it all, he blunders and harms those around him. His idealistic, romantic struggle is what endears him to us despite his horrible deeds. He yearns for a moment of exhilarated unity with creation, but in the end learns, as we must, that human existence is not fulfilled by such peaks of experience, but rather by the very striving for them.

James M. Skidmore is chairman of the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Waterloo.

Montaigne Essays - 50 Greatest Books

Montaigne Essays

PHILIPPE DESAN
Globe and Mail
October 4, 2008

In 1580, Michel de Montaigne published in Bordeaux a book made unique by its title, Essais — literally "attempts" — and a literary genre was born. Over 20 years, Montaigne would rewrite and republish it several times, up until his death.

The Essays resemble a patchwork of personal reflections that nonetheless all tend toward a single goal: to live better in the present and to prepare for death.

These considerations, or essays, offer a point of departure for the modern reader's own assessments. In brief, one does not read Montaigne, one practises Montaigne. How does one systematize the thought of an author who didn't claim to write anything other than essays bound never quite to succeed?

The very form of the essay presupposes its inevitable failure, for otherwise it would no longer be an essay. Modern thinkers create systems, not essays. Yet Montaigne did elaborate a philosophy of life without precepts, mottos or systems. His thought claims to be amorphous or, better, multisided (which hardly means powerless).

Whereas Descartes and all of Western thought, from the 17th century on, sought to develop philosophies of content, Montaigne, on the contrary, was at pains to think the form itself, or rather many different forms of thought, knowledge and man. For him, these forms can only be apprehended in their relation to other thoughts, other men and other possible worlds (Christopher Columbus had just discovered a New World).

Montaigne's true originality is precisely his fleeting attempt to think of form as an organizing model of all knowledge. All is form — or rather forms — since diversity is inherent to the human condition.

Variety is the very motor of humanity and its history: From the Ancients' writings to the "Cannibals" of the New World, all of us are witnesses to the multiplicity of human thought, customs and practices.

From this observation, Montaigne postulates that "each man bears the entire form of man's estate." He strives to identify difference and prefers to conceive of the human condition in terms of its diversity, from which he will develop the principle of distingo: To understand one's self is also to understand the other (a finding we should perhaps take seriously, today more than ever).

Starting from a materialist assumption, Montaigne realized that the body is the foundation for all knowledge, and the mind is inseparable from the body: "as is seen in the movement of the planets, wherein, since our mind cannot reach it nor imagine its natural course, we lend them, on our own part, material, gross, physical springs."

In this crucial moment — one that defines "modernity" — knowledge thus depends on both the experiences of the body and the conceptualizations of the mind. Similar to the oscillations of the world and the universe, the "body and mind are in perpetual motion and action."

All knowledge is relative insofar as it depends on bodily experiences that will sometimes adapt to the mind, and other times dominate it. The mind and the body both deform and reveal what Montaigne calls an inner "monstrosity" (historically visible during the religious wars of his time), but this is a monstrosity that Montaigne deems worthy of consideration in his understanding of human action where mind and body go as a pair.

As he puts it: "My mind will not budge unless my legs move it." All ideas require some kind of action. The mind may then explore the world in all its shapes and forms.

This journey through the meanderings of thought — a thought that can only be understood in its relation to other thoughts — leads Montaigne into an analysis of himself, which he calls "introspection."

The Essays analyze what can be broadly defined as human nature, the endless process by which man tries to impose himself and his opinions upon others through the production of laws, policies or philosophies.

For Montaigne, this recurring battle for what man calls "truth" needs to be put into historical perspective, because, as he puts it: "Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of."

This is why Montaigne's motto is no more than a question: "What do I know?"

It's a question that always needs to be asked, even when others give us ready answers.

In summary, one could argue that reading Montaigne today teaches us that the angle of vision defines the world we see, or, as Montaigne wrote: "What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it."

Philippe Desan is Howard L. Willett Professor of French and History of Culture at the University of Chicago, the author of four books on Montaigne and a specialist in the Renaissance.

The Social Contract - 50 Greatest Books

50 Greatest Books

The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
September 27, 2008
Globe and Mail

The Social Contract (1762) is a masterpiece of one of the most fascinating of writers. The thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was world-breaking and world-making. His effect on his own age was seismic, and the tremors have never subsided.


To proclaim him the intellectual founder of the modern left is actually to understate his accomplishments. There was no other thinker in whom so many modern impulses converged, only to emerge transformed, still more modern, more radical, more dangerous and enticing. For all his vast influence on the 19th century, much in his thought was so farsighted that it came to be appreciated only in the late 20th.

Rousseau begins from a radical critique of the bourgeois. Indeed, it was he who coined this term in its modern pejorative sense. The bourgeois was the emergent 18th-century type, post-feudal and, one might say, post-Christian. Rational, industrious, this-worldly, homo economicus rather than homo politicus or religiosus, Rousseau was the practical ideal of such Enlightenment thinkers as Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith.

For Rousseau, by contrast, the bourgeois was a mere shadow of the human. Both his rationality and his individualism were spurious. Hopelessly divided against himself, he sought only his own good, but was wholly dependent on others to realize it. Compelled either to serve or to oppress his fellows in order to make them means to his ends, he exemplified what Rousseau called "unsocial sociability." Neither a whole unto himself nor fully a part of a greater whole, he could find no rest himself and could leave none to others.

The Social Contract offers Rousseau's positive alternative to the bourgeois, namely the citizen. Free of the divided consciousness that defines the bourgeois, the citizen is fully integrated into his society. He identifies his own good with its good, his will with the collective or general will.

His primary identity is that not of Lucius or Pierre, but of a citizen of Rome or Geneva. This is so far from natural to human beings that Rousseau himself describes successful civic education as "denaturing." For this, the Legislator is required, that Godlike manipulator of the souls of a people for its own good. Now this doesn't sound at all "liberal"; it may even sound "totalitarian."

It certainly sounds reactionary, given that, as Rousseau tells it, the only genuine examples of such citizens and societies are to be found in the distant past, above all in warlike Sparta and the Roman Republic. Yet Rousseau's argument against the modern liberal solution to the political problem rests on impeccably liberal premises. Human beings are by nature free and equal, and both their interests and their dignity demand that the terms of the social contract be such as to permit them to remain so.

There is, according to Rousseau, only one way to accomplish this: for each to alienate his rights to the community as a whole. If the wills of some are not to be subject to those of others, then all must be subject to the will of all, in which each equally participates. Only thus transformed into the sovereignty of the general will can natural human liberty be preserved in civil society. Anything short of this is a pipe dream, a mere illusion of liberty.

Political equality can be genuine, moreover, only in conditions of substantial social equality. In replacing the inequalities of feudalism with those of rich and poor, modern commercial society offers only a vain pretense of liberty and equality alike.

It was the fate of The Social Contract to serve as the (very partial) inspiration of the Jacobins, and thereafter as a political football between left and right. The latter loathed Rousseau. The former adored him (even if it came to regard him as having been superseded by Marx). For the New Left of the 1960s, however, Rousseau had in effect superseded Marx. Theirs was a cultural and political revolution more than an economic one, and they looked to Rousseau for inspiration on both counts.
He remains the patron saint of communitarianism and "participatory democracy."

In fact, however, The Social Contract transcends all these categories. Far from providing a dogmatic answer to the question of how to establish a just society, it offers a series of paradoxes. If Rousseau's realism teaches that the only legitimate basis for political authority is that offered by the general will, it also renders him acutely sensitive to all the obstacles to this outcome. He is thus is his own most trenchant critic, and The Social Contract is the testament of a first-rate mind grappling with the most intractable problems of human society.

Clifford Orwin is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He has written widely on Rousseau.

Alice in Wonderland - 50 Greatest Books

Alice in Wonderland

IAN STEWART
Globe and Mail
September 20, 2008

In 1862, two clergymen took three little girls for a trip along the river Thames in a rowing-boat. The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church College and Robinson Duckworth was a fellow of Trinity College, both in Oxford. Lorina, Alice and Edith were the daughters of Henry Liddell, dean of Christ Church. To stop the children becoming bored, Dodgson invented a complicated and fanciful tale about a bored little girl called Alice who had a series of adventures.

The story was a hit, and Alice asked Dodgson to write it down. Two years later he did, and sent it to her. A year after that, a much-expanded version appeared in print under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. The book was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, still a firm favourite, and not just with children.

Alice has a timeless appeal, with its surreal characters, fantastic story and quirky events. Alice, sitting on a riverbank, notices a white rabbit. When it takes a watch out of its waistcoat — which she does find a little strange — she follows it down a large rabbit-hole, into Wonderland.

The book was illustrated by John Tenniel, based on Dodgson's sketches, and the illustrations have become an integral part of the book — so much so that even the Disney animated version felt obliged to follow Tenniel's model.

I first came across Alice when my parents took me to see the movie, about 55 years ago, and I have vivid recollections of the caterpillar puffing enormous clouds of smoke, and — it's amazing what sticks — a rocking-horse fly. Which comes from Through the Looking-Glass, the sequel. Alice seems even more surreal nowadays, because we moderns don't always spot the allusions.

The Dodo in the caucus race is Dodgson himself; the Duck is the Reverend Duckworth. The lory is Lorina, the eagle Edith — and Alice is Alice. The rabbit-hole was the back stairs of the main hall of Christ Church College. The verse consists almost entirely of parodies of poems that Victorian children had to learn by heart.

"Tis the voice of the lobster: I heard him declare: 'You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair'." This is a parody of The Sluggard by Isaac Watts, a prominent writer of hymns.

Acres of print have been devoted to the enigma of what makes Alice so special. It can hardly be the story, which rambles from incident to incident with very little clear plot. Alice has a remarkable dreamlike quality — a "stream of unconsciousness" in which events merge into each other, and while each on its own makes a strange sort of sense, there is no overall logic.

Is it the characters? Scarcely a page turns without a new and even more fantastic creature emerging, and the most fantastic of them all must be the Cheshire Cat, which disappears except for its grin. The March Hare and the Mad Hatter are charmingly crazy, the Mock Turtle tugs at your heartstrings, but in such a short book there isn't room to flesh out the characters in the way of, say, Mole in The Wind in the Willows. Carroll's characters play cameo roles. We don't get to know them.

Is it the humour? The book is laden with puns, the parodies make us smile and there is some marvellous slapstick, like the dormouse being stuffed into the teapot. But Alice is not a comedy. (Maybe it is) The pictures? The combination of text and images is powerful and effective, and in Tenniel's hands, Carroll's sketches transcend their origins.

I think it's all of these, and none of them.

For a timeless moment, everything came together to create a timeless book. Dodgson wrote other children's books, such as Sylvie and Bruno. None compares remotely to Alice — except Through the Looking-Glass, which captures the same dreamlike quality and fantastic imagination, and may even be better. The Alice books were an impossible act to follo.

Ian Stewart is professor of mathematics at the University of Warwick, in England.

The Mahabharata - 50 Greatest Books

The Mahabharata

WENDY DONIGER
Globe and Mail
September 12, 2008

To begin with, The Mahabharata is certainly one of the world's biggest books, a text of about 75,000 verses or three million words, some 15 times the combined length of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, or seven times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined, and a hundred times more interesting.

It is an epic poem composed in ancient India, some time between 300 BC and 300 AD (it takes a long time to produce three million words), in Sanskrit, the language of the sacred texts of Hinduism as well as of the secular literature of the court, related to Latin and ancient Greek and functioning, rather like medieval Latin, as a kind of lingua franca among the many vernacular languages of India.

It is attributed to a sage named Vyasa, who produces not only the text but the two grandfathers of the protagonists, impregnating two queens on behalf of their dead husband. The central story is about five princes, whose grandfather is Vyasa and whose fathers are gods.

They are forced into exile for 12 years, during which they have many adventures, listen to hundreds of wonderful stories, and return to fight a cataclysmic battle in which almost everyone on both sides is killed.

As the text was retold over the centuries, both in Sanskrit and in translation into more accessible spoken languages of India, hundreds of other stories, as well as philosophical arguments, were attracted to it as to a magnet, so that it became a great compendium of myth, folklore and social theory, a kind of walking encyclopedia of Hinduism.

It grows out of the oral tradition and then grows back into the oral tradition.

It flickers back and forth between Sanskrit manuscripts and village storytellers, each adding new gemstones to the old mosaic, constantly reinterpreting it.

The loose construction of the text gives it a quasi-novelistic quality, open to new forms as well as new ideas, inviting different ideas to contest one another, to come to blows, in the pages of the texts.

The text itself boasts, with justification, "What is here is also found elsewhere, but what is not here is found nowhere else."

The conversation between the incarnate god Krishna and Prince Arjuna on the eve of the great battle has become one of the central texts of Hinduism, called the Song of God (Bhagavad Gita).

Other parts of the text, too, have been lifted out and become a part of the cultural tradition, such as the story of King Nala and his wife Damayanti, who become separated when he becomes a compulsive gambler and loses his kingdom. Eventually they are reunited.

The five princes marry one woman, Draupadi, who is worshipped as a goddess in India to this day, particularly in the south.

It has been well said that no one in India ever hears The Mahabharata for the first time.

Its greatness lies also in its dark moral complexity. The real protagonist of the poem is neither any of the human heroes nor any of the many gods who take part in the story, but dharma, the moral and religious law of the Hindus.

Dharma is also a god, who fathers the eldest of the five princes and appears from time to time to test him, usually in disguise (once as a dog, an animal that Hindus regard as unclean, a stunning form for the religious law to take).

Time and again when a character finds that every available moral choice is the wrong choice, or when one of the good guys does something obviously very wrong, he will mutter, or be told, "Dharma is subtle," thin and slippery as a fine silk sari, elusive as a will o' the wisp, internally inconsistent as well as disguised, hidden, masked.

People try again and again to do the right thing, and fail and fail, until they no longer know what the right thing is. The heroes are tragically flawed, each of them undone by the shadow side of his particular virtue.

The Mahabharata deconstructs dharma, exposing the inevitable chaos of the moral life. In particular, it exposes the horror of war, even while it justifies it as part of the inevitable violence of human life. This, too, is its greatness.

Wendy Doniger is Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, and author of many books about Indian literature, including "Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities" and a translation of the "Kamasutra."

Theban Trilogy - 50 Greatest Books

I cannot beleive I forgot about the 50 Greatest Books series. I havent posted about them for quite a while. This is bad. This is very bad. But I guess it's because I have gone back to school. I must try and remember to keep doing this series.

The Theban Trilogy By Sophocles
PETER STOTHARD
September 6, 2008

Almost 2,500 years ago, when there were few books to read and a fast-expanding population of the curious, an Athenian playwright dramatized three big questions in three great tragedies. Where do I come from? How do I prepare for my death? What should I obey?

Each play in Sophocles's Theban Trilogy, as we call it, was about the mythical family of Oedipus, rulers of Thebes in the dark times before the Trojan War. Their common theme was the violent birth of civilized values. This was not just entertainment for Athens' mass audience of citizen spectators. These works forced an aggressive engagement with what became great issues of all times, what it means for a man to understand himself, to have free will and at the same time to believe in the gods, to balance duties, to take responsibilities for past and future.

Oedipus the King, the most famous of the three, is the story of a man deliberately finding out who he is. To his own and others' horror, he is the killer of his father and the husband of his mother. He is the monarch honoured for curing the city's plague who discovers that he is its cause. He is the determined detective who finds that the criminal is himself.

In Oedipus at Colonus, the longest and least known, the king is outlawed, cursed and aged. He is preparing himself for death, for possible redemption, for something different from life or something the same. Antigone, the most popular of the plays today, takes up the narrative when Oedipus's sons are also dead, each killed by the other in civil war. Universal divine law demands burial for them both. Theban law offers respect for the defender of the city alone. Their surviving sister has to choose which law is right - and dies for her choice.

Sophocles did not himself intend these plays as a trilogy. Antigone was the first to be written, when Athens was at the height of its democratic power and pride, the years of restless skepticism, empire and the building of the Parthenon. Oedipus at Colonus was the last, composed 40 years later, when Athenian democracy was shamed and close to its end. Oedipus the King came between the two, timed when the Athenians at war knew directly the plagues of their own. The horrors of Thebes - Athens' authoritarian neighbour with its crude and brutal past - were like a primeval swamp into which Sophocles could dip for whatever need he saw.

Later producers, publishers and readers reordered the plays according to their place in the mythical history that they described. First comes King Oedipus in power and glory, before discovering his past and blinding himself. Second, Antigone leads him to a fragile security and serenity for death at Colonus, the place of Sophocles's own birth. Third, Antigone herself is walled up for death by starvation, punished by Thebes for obeying the gods, pardoned through force of argument, but not in time to save her.

That has been the most satisfying order. Like the history plays of Shakespeare, a chronological cycle imposed after their creation has enhanced their appeal for those who do not have Thebes as a neighbour and who have reading choices of which Sophocles could never have dreamed.

Oedipus the King was the central model for Freud, albeit denigrated by him as a dull tragedy of fate redeemed by his own sense of its universal particularities; there is no deeper exposition of the pain of self-examination. Antigone was the inspiration for Jean Anouilh in Nazi France; there is no plot more subtly resonant of the divided responsibilities of good men under bad government. Oedipus at Colonus may be the most due for revival, the eloquent play of the homeless in a land of plenty, the polluted in a land of high religion, the play in which a curse can finally become a blessing.

Individually, they have different powers today. Together, they form one of the milestones in the emerging of humanity, a lighthouse against the rocks, a permanent warning of places that are never far away.

50 Greatest Books - Principia Mathematica

Principia Mathematica

DAN FALK
Globe and Mail
August 15, 2008

The scope and originality of Isaac Newton's Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) make it seem like a prophecy delivered from a mountaintop rather than a textbook in mathematical physics penned by a reclusive Cambridge professor.

To be sure, the Principia did not come out of the blue. Its central ideas came to Newton beginning in 1665, when an outbreak of the plague forced the university to shut down. The young scholar, still in his early 20s, returned to the family home in Lincolnshire.

Over the next 18 months, he laid out the laws of mechanics, developed a new branch of mathematics (which we now call calculus), began his investigations of light and colour and deduced the law of gravity.

And he kept it all to himself.

The notebooks and papers containing Newton's revolutionary ideas collected dust in his study for more than 20 years, until astronomer Edmond Halley urged him to publish. The massive text was finally printed in 1687, and met with universal acclaim — at least, from those who could decipher its message.

While Newton was surely a product of his time — he had devoured Galileo's dynamics and Descartes' mechanical philosophy — the Principia was a great leap forward from anything that had come before.

In its dense pages, Newton analyzes motion in a resistive medium, calculates the speed of sound, explains the irregularities in the moon's orbit and works out the physics behind the ocean's tides. He even uses the Earth's true shape (our planet is slightly "bulged" at the equator) to explain the "precession of the equinoxes" — the gradual wobble of the Earth's axis in a 26,000-year cycle.

And then there was the insight into gravitation. Allegedly inspired by a falling apple, Newton came to see that the same force could pull a falling body to the ground and hold the moon in its orbit — a force whose strength could be calculated with mathematical precision.

Newton used this "law of universal gravitation" to compute the orbits of all the planets, and even the motion of comets that sweep past the sun along highly elliptical (or even parabolic) paths.

There could no longer be any doubt that celestial and terrestrial physics were as one; the same rules applied in the heavens as on Earth.

Again and again, Newton took seemingly unrelated phenomena and found the unifying principles that underlie them — always with the calculations to back him up. Galileo's claim that nature was "written in the language of mathematics" was now firmly established.

There were, of course, unresolved problems: To some philosophers, the idea of a force acting over a distance seemed like more like magic than science.

Indeed, Einstein would later describe gravity as a warping of space itself rather than a force. It would also fall to Einstein to correct the Principia's assumption of "absolute" space and time, which had served as a foundation for Newton's mechanics but are now seen to have their limitations.

And now, the confession: I have not actually read the entire Principia (though I've read many portions of it in modern translation, and own a lovely 1960 edition).

In fact, hardly anyone in more than 100 years has actually read it. Even physicists have great difficulty with the book: In his calculus, Newton used complex geometrical representations which have since given way to more elegant notational systems. (Newton would later say that he had made the text purposely difficult so as to ward off "little Smatterers in Mathematicks" — likely a jab at rival Robert Hooke.)

So we honour the Principia not for its prose, but for the world view that it represents — what Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg has called "Newton's Dream" — the quest "to understand all of nature, in the way that he was able to understand the solar system, through principles of physics that could be expressed mathematically."

If you can't quite wrap your head around the Principia, you can take comfort in an anecdote — probably apocryphal — about a pupil in Newton's day who had similar troubles.

Watching the great man pass by in his carriage, the young student supposedly quipped, "There goes the man that writ a book that neither he nor anybody else understands."

The King James Bible - 50 Greatest Books

This was never one of my favourite books. Even if I did grow up being required to read it. The language is so old. It is Elizabethan English. I do not live in the Elizabethan era. I wish I did though, because it was certainly a much more interesting era than today. If I ever HAD to read any Bible, I would choose the New International (NIV) Version. It's in modern English.

The Good Book

Like Vladimir Nabokov, the Almighty did his best writing in English. His Hebrew and German (I mean He, not Nabokov) were also excellent, but His Greek and Latin were a bit sloppy. Still, no one's perfect. The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible of 1611 (also called the Authorized Version) was a new creation. If it still is the best rendering of the Hebrew and Greek originals in English, it nevertheless changed utterly the way the Tanakh (the Hebrew scriptures) and the so-called New Testament are read. The magisterial language of the KJV loses in its solemnity the Hebrew puns and word games of the Tanakh and covers up the verbal messiness of the Greek New Testament.

By force of the English language at its strongest, the KJV makes the two testaments into a single story. This merging has theological implications that many find uncomfortable (understandably, Jewish readers do not favour the union). However, one can savour the single sweeping literary text without having to buy into the idea that the New Testament supersedes the "Old." The Good Book is a very good book indeed.

More even than William Shakespeare, the KJV sculpted the English language and thus the way anyone who uses English thinks. It is also the language's largest source ever assembled of metaphors, clichés and plots waiting to be cribbed. You cannot read a 19th-century Canadian parliamentary debate or replay a stump speech by any 20th-century U.S. presidential candidate or go through movie channels on your TV set tonight without running into words, phrases, allusions and narrative turns that are straight from the scriptures. The bible-belting in Pulp Fiction and the constant cinematic threats of Armageddon come from the same source.

It is only justice that the King James Version of the Bible is so often plagiarized, for in itself the KJV is the biggest piece of plagiarism in English-language culture. Roughly 90 per cent of the New Testament of 1611 was lifted from the work of William Tyndale. Before his martyrdom, in 1536, he had managed to translate the entire New Testament from Greek while on the run from church authorities, and he had made a good start on the Hebrew scriptures. These were assimilated into the Geneva Bible, the first complete English-language Bible widely available to the common people. The committee set up by James VI of Scotland (who became James I of England in 1603) knew a good thing when they saw it and stole most of it fair and square.

Of course, the KJV is not beyond criticism, the most telling being that in many parts it is better than are the originals. The high-pitched ranting of the minor prophets and the blood-drenched discourse of the Book of Revelation are converted from being psychiatrically diagnostic into searing and radical literature. Several more recent versions sort out translation errors, but most are either tone-deaf (the Revised Standard Version of the 1880s is particularly musicless), tools of colporteurs (do they really need to hear Jesus in Scouse?) or collections of niggles by academics (who, quite realistically, understand that even biblical scholars must publish or perish). Robert Alter, the one modern translator to equal in power the KJV in the portions of the Tanakh that he has completed, rightly comments that "nothing traduces the power of the original more egregiously than the nonstyle cultivated by the sundry modern versions."

"The greatest vehicle of mass literacy in the English-speaking world has been the King James Bible," Robert Stone states. "It has been the great primer." He is right and here he leads us to recognize one of the most stealthy cases of social class and intergenerational cultural warfare in the last half-century. It has confidently been asserted by mega-church preachers and professors of pastoral theology that "everyday people" and "today's youth" cannot understand the language of the KJV. Of course they can. The members of a generation that can master a new form of English that is communicated mostly through their thumbs can certainly get its head around the difference between "thee," "thou" and "thy." If they are encouraged to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the most widescreen, soaring, magical, brutal, depressing, elevating and sublime document in our language, they will be forever grateful and we all will be the better for it.

The KJV is not only the standard by which all English-language literature must be judged, it is also the source of the Prime Critical Directive, the ultimate statement of authorial responsibility: "Though I speak with the tongue of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling symbol." No writer escapes that.