Jonathan Swift Books

The Great Illustrated classics are great (no pun intended) I like Gulliver's travels. On a scale from 1 to 10 I give it a 8. It's a good book I liked the pic's thay where made very nice. I liked how the story was toled. it's fun to read. READ IT!

"...I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

There are many things "Gulliver's Travels": funny, comedic, satirical, depressing, inspiring, etc. But there is one thing it is not: a book for children. If Swift knew this he would laugh and telll us to boil our children and eat them! ;)

Swift is most likely the greatest satirist that ever lived and his intellect is very prominent in "Gulliver's Travels". He creates his own fool, Lemuel Gulliver, a man of great book intellect but too much wind in the ears. Swift sends him on little voyages to other countries not to give the reader something interesting to read but to shine a light of everyone's eyes. That's why Gulliver is so flat. Swift does not want the reader to understand Gulliver or even like Gulliver because "Gulliver's Travels" is NOT a novel and Gulliver is not a character, he's the human race surrounded by the human race.

Gulliver leaves his wife, who does not question him, and ends up on the isle of the Lilliputians, near Madagascar. There he is bound up and taken as prisoner of tiny people, only six inches in height. He proves these people that he is not only a genteel servant but he is quite a disgusting pig, seeing nothing wrong on urinating all over. What's so wrong with that? But Gulliver's disgusting ways are not the mind grabber. Look at the Lilliputians: they are petty little buggers making their govermental officials do tricks to get elected. Are we not the same?

Gulliver arrives at home only to leave his wife anbd family for the Brobdingnagians, the isle of the giants near the Cape of Good Hope. Now, it is reversed. Gulliver must endure the putrid stinche of these iodious animals and be used as a sex toy for the ladies. Obviously not for children. Swift takes from his poems to show how people may look beautiful on the outside, but we're really disgusting creatures underneath all the perfume. It's quite comical when he describes the farmer's wife's breasts. It made me think how men idiolize a woman for her breasts when they're really giants lump of flesh for nursing.

Part III is quick, Gulliver returns home, leaves and encounters four different people all near Japan. The Laputa's are hilarious, like some of our masterminds today, focusing on the higher level of thinking and rejecting the fundamental steps to these levels. Lagado is very similar except that these people extract sunbeams from cucumbers and do all sorts of ridiculous things that mean nothing at all. The Glubbdubdribs really caught my eye in that they are really intellectual but take pride in their sodomy, raping, incest, theft and other immoral acts. People seem to think genius equals insanity and insanity equals immorality. These people feel they can easily get away with whatever they deem well because they are intellectual.

Gulliver returns home, but I think he finally realizes he is deprived because he gets his older wife pregnant. He leaves her and encounters the Yahoos, the Id in Freudian theory and the Houyhnhnms, the super ego. This is my favourite Part and probably the saddest because we see what a lot of religious people do: reject the ego for the super ego (I do not mean manly ego, I am talking about Freud). I will not further discuss this part since this is the best part.

All throughout this satire, Swift throws a wet blanket on politics, religion (hypocritical religion) and the human race in general. We need to be ego, be human, but no petty, shiftless, disgusting or ignorant. I think Swift truly understands the complexities and simplicities of human nature.

Don't misunderstand, the book is great, so was the last book with the same title "Gullivers Travels. However both are what is called "Case books", or a critique of the work, or a landmark of the work describing a number of critics evaluating the work.What I wanted was THE BOOK "Gullivers Travels". Hopefully, when I reorder, I will finally get THE book.I'm learning.

Jonathan Swift is hillarious!! He is true to his words and expresses his beliefs about politics through gulliver. i thought the book was very good but kind of hard to follow at times. i liked the way swift tied in all of gulliver's travels, and also how swift managed to satire politics and religion and many other things of humanity. he is true to his words and i agree with many of the things that swift said in his book. for example when the Lilliputians are fighting because of which side of the egg to break off, i saw the relation to government and real wars right away. i would reccommend this book to anyone who has not read it. it is a very good look at society and governments.

Mr Swift is enormously accurate, a pundit of exalted talent. Wish he were here to justly give a critique of our political nightmare.

Satire is sadly lacking in today's society. Satire holds human vices and folly up for ridicule. Swift is not advocating the economy of eating babies, but maybe the fact that they are currently eating the body parts of aborted fetuses in China seems to steal something from Swift's modestly porposed satire-or maybe it is too outrageous seeming to be true.

Nevertheless, this is a brilliant work by a brilliant writer. It should be required reading. It is a pristine example of satire. Should we stop choking deaths by improvising starvation-- seek a new president by electing children? Satire is a genius' way of entertaining social change-literally. Although, sometimes though, even what once seemed impossibly satiric does not remain-which is proof of human folly.

This read is pretty congested with 18th century European political and religious references, however it is a beautifully witty and priceless satire on the inconsistencies of human compassion.

Perhaps Swift was trying to evoke shock and heart wrenching disgust in readers in the hopes that the reader would see that England's economic exploitation of Dublin at the time was essentially just as damaging to society as something like government ordained cannibalism. Why is it that a reader would be so horrifically devastated by the idea of turning children into food in order to survive, yet remain callous and unconcerned with the fact that all people, adults and children alike, were in reality victims of a government which not only economically exploited the population to the point of utter poverty, but did not care even slightly that human beings were being turned into rotting corpses as a result?

I think this book was quite interesting but very weird
HI everyone in kingston jamaica

Swfit was perhaps the first major writer to introduce cannibalism into Western political thought, and incorporate it successfully into practical economics. I'm disturbed that Swfit's visionary solution to Thomas Malthus' omen about the dangers of overpopulation hasn't yet been seriously considered by world policymakers. That's just like politicians though, they do anything to get elected - hence another reason why extending the franchise to the lower rungs of the social hierarchy was a terrible mistake and should be revoked.

This book reads like fiction, but keeps coming back to facts, people and actual places. Overall a great read with never a dull moment. The author's care for history is apparent - as is his love a a good story.

Mr. Prather puts a new twist on an old Kentucky legend. His investigation introduces us to the enigmatic Mr. Swift who is an international trader, an ambassador, a freemason of considerable standing, a merchant with connections extending to President George Washington and perhaps--a homicidal miner. Throw in a secret code by Robert Louis Stephenson and you have a gripping historical mystery. Did I mention a lost silver mine.....?

For those who like their History with a bit of mystery this book is for you. Not only is this tale highly readable, it is well researched and entertaining. The probable connections with Robert Louis Stevenson's Long John Silver and Jonathan Swift make for a stimulating debate. I would definitely recommend this book not just for History buffs, but also fans of Robert Louis Stevenson, and treasure seekers alike.

Mostly a waste of time - filled with anecdotal "facts" and assumptions. About as meaningful as Pres Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy and Pres. Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln. I have assigned my copy to the weekly collection recycling service.

The title says it all. This book had pertinent information related to the course I was taking.

This book was a required reading for a course I'm taking, great reading.

Perhaps the most famous work included is "An argument against abolishing Christianity", in which he points out the "Inconveniences" of abolishing Christianity. Why even "The Bank of East India Stock my fall at least one per cent". As a clergy, Swift wants to skewer the Enlightenment deism project of a rational religion.

Some of the other essays are more humorous, such as "A meditation upon a broomstick", and who can imagine the proposal of admiring gloves for ladies (made of baby's skin), being published today! The tale of the spider and the bee in the battle of the books, reminded me of Francis Bacon's earlier story of the spider, the ant, and the bee in the Novum Organum. Well I'd better stop now, to quote Swift "Some people take more care to hide their wisdom than their folly".

Asimov does his typically thorough job of annotating, filling this book with tons of information about obscure references and historical tidbits. However, I was a bit dismayed at Asimov's heavy-handed critique of Swift in the 3rd book. As many readers of Swift know, the 3rd book contains a very harsh criticism of science and technology. Asimov decides to use his annotations to defend science. While his aims are certainly admirable, I think that he takes Swift's comments out of context in an effort to prove his own case.

That minor cavil aside, this is an excellent book for young people studying this great classic of literature, and for fans of both Swift and Asimov.

i think this is a good book it is a 4 cuz some of the things are inacurate.

This comment refers to the Bantam Classics Paperback version. And is just a small criticism.

This very affordable little paperback is a jam packed with most of Swifts writings, but if you start to venture beyond Gulliver's Travels and his lighter proposals you will find yourself quickly wishing for a little more in the way of footnotes or endnotes.

I picked this book up to read A Tale of the Tub for the first time. It is wonderful piece of writing, and many scholars call it Swift's best. However, even the introduction to the Bantam edition points out that we have to sometimes rely on scholarship to fill in many of the allusions in the text that have been lost to time.

I enjoyed reading it, but found myself many times wondering what Swift's target or motivation was for writing certain passages. This edition won't help you out.

I wish to reread Tale of a Tub, but I will probably pick up a better annotated version.

Any suggestions for a well-annotated version. The Oxford Classics or maybe the Norton?

We have a couple of these books and my 5 year old devours them as he discovers them. I actually came on to Amazon and searched them to buy more but now I can't for the life of me figure out why these slim paperback books cost so much?!! Is this the normal price for a graphic novel? Well, my son loves them and these are stories he'll read in full in a few years so it's nice for him to gain an interest in the characters now. Very cool concept.