Books that shook the world

Thomas Paine was one of the greatest advocates of freedom in history, and his Declaration of the Rights of Man, first published in 1791, is the key to his reputation. Inspired by his outrage at Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, Paine's text is a passionate defense of man's inalienable rights. Since its publication, Rights of Man has been celebrated, criticized, maligned, suppressed, and co-opted. But here, polemicist and commentator Christopher Hitchens marvels at its forethought and revels in its contentiousness. Hitchens, a political descendant of the great pamphleteer, demonstrates how Paine's book forms the philosophical cornerstone of the United States, and how, "in a time when both rights and reason are under attack," Thomas Paine's life and writing "will always be part of the arsenal on which we shall need to depend." (New Statesman)--From publisher description.

From [Goodreads]: "The identity of the poet Homer will always remain a mystery, but there is little doubt that the epic poems assembled under his name form the cornerstone of Western literature, feeding our imagination for over two and a half millennia. The Iliad and The Odyssey, with their incomparable tales of the Trojan War, brave Achilles, Ulysses and Penelope, the Sirens, the Cyclops, Helen of Troy, and the petulant gods, are familiar to most readers because they are so pervasive. From Plato to Virgil, Pope to Joyce, Dante to Wolfgang Petersen, the poems have been told and retold, interpreted and embellished. As Manguel writes, "In a very real sense, The Iliad and The Odyssey are familiar to us prior to opening the first page."" In this graceful and sweeping book, Alberto Manguel traces the lineage of the poems from their inception and first recording. He considers the original purpose of the poems, either as allegory of philosophical truth or as a record of historical truth, surveys the challenges the pagan Homer presented to the early Christian world, and shows how this "primordial spring without which there would have been no culture" spread after the Reformation. Following Homer through the greatest literature ever created, Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey above all delights in the poems themselves.