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Topic: "Books That Have Made History"

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Subject: "Books That Have Made History"
Date Posted: 5/3/2014 3:17 PM ET
Member Since: 10/17/2006
Posts: 1,427
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An ad for The Great Courses suggested that the person perusing the ad "Discover 36 Books That Can Change Your Life".  The list of "Books That Have Made History" included two works of fiction (if one does not count the two books of the Old Testament and one Gospel of the New Testament).  The tally depends on how one regards the Book of Exodus and the Book of Job and the Gospel of Mark.

Anyhow, in Position 19 is 1984, by George Orwell, and in Position 22, All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque.  The professor who delivers the lectures counts Faust, Part I, and Faust, Part II, by J.W. von Goethe, as two books.

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Date Posted: 5/3/2014 7:27 PM ET
Member Since: 9/14/2008
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Do you have a link to the list?

 

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Date Posted: 5/3/2014 8:46 PM ET
Member Since: 10/17/2006
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No, Sue, it was in a magazine.  Here it is:

Letters and Papers From Prison, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer;

Iliad,  Homer;

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius;

Bhagavad Gita;

Book of Exodus;

Gospel of Mark;

Koran;

Gilgamesh;

Beowulf;

Book of Job;

Oresteia, Aeschylus;

Bacchae, Euripides;

Phædo, Plato;

The Divine Comedy, Dante;

Othello, The Moor of Venice, Shakespeare;

Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus;

The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn;

Julius Caesar, Shakespeare;

1984, George Orwell;

Aeneid, Vergil;

Oration, Pericles, & Gettysburg Address, Lincoln;

All Quiet on the Western Front, Remarque;

The Analects, Confucius;

The Prince, Machiavelli;

Republic, Plato;

On Liberty, John Stuart Mill;

Morte d'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory;

Faust (Part One) Faust (Part Two): Johann Wolfgang von Goethe;

Walden, Henry David Thoreau;

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon;

The History of Freedom, Lord Acton;

On Moral Duties (De Officiis); Cicero;

An Autobiography, Mohandas K. Gandhi;

My Early Life; Painting as a Pastime; WWII, Winston Churchill



Last Edited on: 9/10/14 3:56 PM ET - Total times edited: 3
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Date Posted: 9/21/2014 8:40 AM ET
Member Since: 6/30/2008
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Books That Have Made History

I think people say that Uncle Tom's Cabin was one of those books. and The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.