Philosophy, Logic, & Ethics

James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) is often considered to be one of the finest pieces of biographical writing in the English language. Samuel Johnson was an English poet, essayist, and lexicographer who produced a pioneering and influential Dictionary of the English Language. However, he is less well-known today for his writings than as the biographical subject for Boswell, a lawyer from Scotland who first met Johnson in 1763. During their 21-year friendship... Read The Life of Samuel Johnson Summary

In 2009, Peter Singer, philosopher and ethicist at Princeton University, published The Life You Can Save, a short treatise on the obligations of affluent persons to alleviate the suffering of those experiencing extreme poverty on a global scale. By this time in his career, Singer had spent several decades on ethical questions related to global poverty. In 1972, he produced a seminal essay in the field, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” After a much more recent... Read The Life You Can Save Summary

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry drew heavily on his own experiences when writing his 1943 novella, The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince). Like the story's first-person narrator, Saint-Exupéry was a pilot, and the inspiration for the book's central events came from his own 1935 crash-landing in the Sahara Desert. As the story begins, the narrator is still a young child showing off his drawings of boa constrictors eating elephants to the adults around him. The adults react... Read The Little Prince Summary

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The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, published in 2007, is a nonfiction book written by Philip Zimbardo, an American psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He rose to prominence for his Stanford Prison Experiment and is founder and president of the Heroic Imagination Project. In The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo argues that humans are neither good nor evil. Instead, systemic and situational forces shape individuals’ actions, and every individual has the... Read The Lucifer Effect Summary

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, co-authored by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, is a nonfiction scholarly text comprising 16 interconnected essays. Published in 1979, this lengthy volume is now widely considered a foundational text of feminist literary criticism. A second edition appeared in 2000 accompanied by a new Introduction by the authors that offers readers insight into Gilbert and Gubar’s decision to focus the work on... Read The Madwoman in the Attic Summary

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was conceived in the 1910s, which is when the bulk of the novel takes place; however, it was not completed until 1924, after the cataclysmic events of the first world war. Mann was born in 1875, just four years after the creation of the modern state of Germany and the failed revolutionary Commune of France. During World War II, he was exiled from Germany, where Nazis burned copies of The Magic... Read The Magic Mountain Summary

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“The Man Who Planted Trees” is a short story published in 1953 by French author Jean Giono. It chronicles a shepherd’s three-decade-long effort to reforest a barren tract of land in Southeastern France. Spanning a time period shortly before World War I until shortly after World War II, the story is both an antiwar allegory and an environmental allegory. “The Man Who Planted Trees” inspired numerous adaptations across various mediums, including a 1988 Academy Award-winning... Read The Man Who Planted Trees Summary

The Man Who Was Thursday is a thriller novel published in 1908 by the English author G.K. Chesterton. Subtitled A Nightmare, the book weaves together elements of mystery, comedic farce, and allegory around the threat of anarchy in turn-of-the-century London. For over a century after its publication, The Man Who Was Thursday inspired numerous adaptations, including a 1938 Mercury Theatre radio-play written by Orson Welles. Other works by Chesterton include Orthodoxy, The Ball and the... Read The Man Who Was Thursday Summary

The narrator muses that it must have been January of the present year when she first detected a small, round, dark mark on the wall. This mark will serve as the impetus for the entire story. She then states that “in order to fix a date”, it “is necessary to remember what one saw” (1). Next, she recalls the fire, a ray of light on her book, and three chrysanthemums in a vase, in order... Read The Mark on the Wall Summary

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Jonathan D. Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984) is a biography of 16th-century Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci. Spence is a former professor of history at Yale University and a specialist in Chinese history. The biography is a study of cross-cultural exchange between Ming China and Counter-Reformation Europe. It charts Ricci’s attempts to teach a mnemonic device called the memory palace to scholarly elites in Ming China and his experiences as a missionary in... Read The Memory Palace Of Matteo Ricci Summary

First published in 1915, Franz Kafka’s surrealist novella The Metamorphosis, translated from Die Verwandlung, is widely acclaimed and one of the author’s best-known works. Kafka, a Jewish novelist and short-story writer, is regarded for his exploration of the fantastic. Kafka employs realism to depict his protagonists in bizarre circumstances. In The Metamorphosis, Kafka incorporates themes of alienation and absurdity to convey narratives about isolated and anxious protagonists. The time period in which The Metamorphosis transpires is... Read The Metamorphosis Summary

The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould, is a survey and critique of 19th- and 20th-century theories that posited human intelligence was a fixed and measurable number. Gould argues that mainstream scientists were not immune to the widespread racist and prejudicial beliefs of their time, and that these unconscious biases underlie the history of biological determinism, or the argument that shared human behavior is innate and primarily controlled by biology. Under this argument, social... Read The Mismeasure Of Man Summary