Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 400 pages
- Published by: Collins
- Edition: 4th Edition June 2, 1999
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0062720732
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0062720733
-
Book Dimensions:
7.8 x 5.3 x 1 inches
- Weighs: 10.4 ounces
Product Review
In print for almost forty years,
The Lifetime Reading Plan has long been a worthy addition to any serious reader's bookshelf, providing entertaining and informative introductions to the great works of Western civilization. Now, this "classic about classics" has been updated to reflect more diverse traditions.
The New Lifetime Reading Plan recommends great literature from around the globe, including writers and works from Confucius to Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez to the Koran. Also new is an appendix profiling books by 100 important 20th-century authors--or "temporary classics," as coauthor John S. Major calls them.
Readers may argue with some of the selections (or, more likely, the omissions). Others may quarrel with the editors' opinions; they routinely analyze artists' "characters,"with occasionally prissy or patronizing results. (Of Walt Whitman, for instance, coauthor Clifton Fadiman declares that "He had an original temperament, a certain peasant shrewdness, but only a moderate amount of brains.") But no one can argue with the book's mission: promoting the classics as "life companions." "Once part of you, they work in and on and with you until you die," Fadiman writes in the introduction. Anyone seeking a guide to the vast riches of world literature need look no further than the
The New Lifetime Reading Plan; it provides a gateway to the greatest achievements of the human mind.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Now in print for the first time in almost forty years,
The New Lifetime Reading Plan provides readers with brief, informative and entertaining introductions to more than 130 classics of world literature. From Homer to Hawthorne, Plato to Pascal, and Shakespeare to Solzhenitsyn, the great writers of Western civilization can be found in its pages. In addition, this new edition offers a much broader representation of women authors, such as Charlotte Bront%, Emily Dickinson and Edith Wharton, as well as non-Western writers such as Confucius, Sun-Tzu, Chinua Achebe, Mishima Yukio and many others.
This fourth edition also features a simpler format that arranges the works chronologically in five sections (The Ancient World; 300-1600; 1600-1800; and The 20th Century), making them easier to look up than ever before. It deserves a place in the libraries of all lovers of literature.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: The New Lifetime Reading Plan (Hardcover)
This book is an anthology of summaries of the better books written since the time of the scroll and stylus. Unlike its predecessor, the Great Books of Western Civilization, this compendium broadens its horizons to include Eastern literature as well as Western. There's no question that many of the books recommended one read over the course of one's lifetime are truly meritorious, but there have crept in a few books which are interesting only because they appeal to a non-Western reader. Fair enough, but it tends to reduce the important works of civilization to a lower common denominator. Also, there are some serious omissions, as most of the attention is devoted to "literature," and not to works in philosophy, praxelogy, axiology, social and scientific history, and political, economic, and scientific breakthroughs. If one desires a list of the great books in all fields of endeavor, this is NOT the book. Too many books are omitted for that kind of enterprise. Indeed, looking at the Great Books website will provide a better list of books that really deserve our attention, and make our devotion to reading them perennially valuable. However, if literature is one's only interest, then this can be a helpful overview.
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