Description

Half-hour summaries of well-known books sound like a good idea for an audio project. Listening to brief overviews of important works of literature, philosophy, and science is a pleasing prospect if the presentations are intellectually stimulating and well performed. InteliQuest’s approach is to offer fairly dry plot summations of books most educated Americans have at least heard of and may even have read. While the program’s promotional literature promises “a wealth of knowledge attained by only a few people who have ever lived,” superficial awareness is about all that most listeners can expect from The World’s 100 Greatest Books. The collection consists of 70 novels and epic poems from writers from Homer to Harper Lee, 15 plays from Aeschylus to Arthur Miller, eight philosophical works from Aristotle to John Dewey, and seven titles dealing with science and civilization from Plato to Oswald Spengler. Each presentation is composed of a quick look at the writer’s life, a brief consideration of how the book fits into the writer’s oeuvre, some historical context, a lengthy plot summary, and some critical commentary at the end. The amount of time devoted to each portion varies from book to book, with many presentations consisting almost entirely of plot summaries. The titles examined present few surprises, with the most daring selection being Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. No writers of color and only a handful of women are included. The 20th century is seemingly lacking in great works since there are no titles by such luminaries as William Faulkner, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Vladimir Nabokov, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Five plays by Shakespeare are included but not King Lear, while The Sun Also Rises is not among the three selections from Ernest Hemingway. The timidity indicated by the selections is also evident in the presentations, as when the listener is told that while Voltaire’s Candide might seem “boring and intellectual,” its satire is actually as funny as television programs such as Saturday Night Live. Hyperbole abounds, as in the Iliad and the Odyssey being called the greatest works of literature and Charles Dickens being named the greatest English writer. Other quibbles include the editors’ dismissal of the notion that the governess in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw may be sexually repressed, while no effort is made to place Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in the context of the development of American literature. Mistakes abound as well: The anonymous scholars who have written the analyses confuse “infer” and “imply” and make pronoun case errors. While most of the unnamed readers are adequate, one narrator in particular adopts a condescending tone that is, unfortunately, fitting for the entire project. Not recommended.Michael Adams, Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Lib., Madison, N.J.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.001 The Iliad – Homer 002 The Odyssey – Homer 003 The Aeneid – Virgil 004 Beowulf – Unknown 005 The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri 006 The Travels of Marco Polo – Marco Polo 007 The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer 008 Don Quixote – Cervantes 009 Paradise Lost – John Milton 010 The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan 011 Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe 012 Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe 013 Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift 014 Tom Jones – Henry Fielding 015 Candide – Voltaire 016 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge 017 The Tragedy of Faust – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe 018 The Lady of the Lake – Sir Walter Scott 019 Ivanhoe – Sir Walter Scott 020 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen 021 Frankenstein – Mary Shelley 022 The Red and the Black – Stendahl 023 The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper 024 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 025 Carmen – Prosper Merimee 026 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 027 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 028 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 029 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 030 A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 031 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 032 The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne 033 Camille – Alexandre Dumas 034 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 035 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 036 Idyls of the King – Alfred Lord Tennyson 037 Silas Marner – George Eliot 038 Middlemarch – George Eliot 039 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo 040 Fathers and Sons – Ivan Turgenev 041 Crime and Punishment – Feodor Dostoyevsky 042 The Brothers Karamazov – Feodor Dostoyevsky 043 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott 044 Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 045 The Adventures of Ton Sawyer – Mark Twain 046 The Prince and the Pauper – Mark Twain 047 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain 048 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court – Mark Twain 049 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 050 War and Peace – Leo Tolstory 051 The Return of the Native – Thomas Hardy 052 Toss of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 053 The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James 054 The Turn of the Screw – Henry James 055 Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson 056 The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde 057 The Time Machine – H. G. Wells 058 Dracula – Bram Stoker 059 The Way of All Flesh – Samuel Butler 060 Call of the Wild – Jack London 061 Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis 062 An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser 063 The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald 064 A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway 065 For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway 066 The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway 067 The Maltese Falcon – Dashiell Hammett 068 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 069 The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 070 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee 071 The Republic – Plato 072 The Prince – Machiavelli 073 The Social Contract – Jean-Jacques Rousseau 074 The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith 075 The Origin of Species – Charles Darwin 076 Das Kapital – Karl Marx 077 The Decline of the West – Oswald Spengler 078 Prometheus Bound – Aeschylus 079 Oedipus Rex – Sophocles 080 The Taming of the Shrew – William Shakespeare 081 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 082 Othello – William Shakespeare 083 Macbeth – William Shakespeare 084 The Tempest – William Shakespeare 085 Tartuffe – Moliere 086 Peer Gynt – Henrik Ibsen 087 A Doll’s House – Henrik Ibsen 088 The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde 089 Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmond Rostand 090 The Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov 091 Our Town – Thornton Wilder 092 Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller 093 The Nicomachean Ethics – Aristotle 094 Meditations – Rene Descartes 095 The Critique of Pure Reason – Immanuel Kant 096 The World as Will and Idea – Arthur Schopenhauer 097 Nature – Ralph Waldo Emerson 098 Self-Reliance – Ralph Waldo Emerson 099 Walden – Henry David Thoreau 100 How We Think – John Dewey