Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings

Will the real Gulliver please stand up?Is it an authentic Gulliver experience to read the children's picture book?Or is it a more genuine experience to read it, unedited, without pictures, on a Kindle?I read both this week. I liked the children's version better. The pictures were fun and the edited text included the best of the original and omitted the extraneous material that seemed irrelevant to the heart of the book. I'm happy I read the original as well as the edited version. I can see the appeal of this book for readers. Funny. Thoughtful. Gulliver visits places in the world that make his entire worldview shift and crumble and, finally, evolve. A wonderful book. Or books.

Gulliver's Travels is one of the single greatest works I've ever read. It's hilarious, insightful, educational, filled with action, adventure and comedy. I can't think of a single thing I would change about this work.

Nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read "It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery," remarked Alexander Pope when Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726. One of the unique books of world literature, Swift's masterful satire describes the astonishing voyages of one Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, to surreal kingdoms inhabited by miniature people and giants, quack philosophers and scientists, horses endowed with reason and men who behave like beasts. Written with great wit and invention, Gulliver's Travels is a savage parody on man and his institutions that has captivated readers for nearly three centuries. As bestselling author and critic Allan Bloom observed: show more "Gulliver's Travels is an amazing rhetorical achievement. Swift had not only the judgment with which to arrive at a reasoned view of the world but the fancy by means of which he could re-create that world in a form which teaches where argument fails and which satisfies all while misleading none." This representative collection of Swift's major writings includes the complete Gulliver's Travels as well as A Tale of a Tub, "The Battle of the Books," "A Modest Proposal," "An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity," "The Bickerstaff Papers," and many more of his brilliantly satirical works. Here too are selections from Swift's poetry and portions of his Journal to Stella. Swift's savage ridicule, corrosive wit, and sparkling humor are fully displayed in this comprehensive collection. show less

Pure satire, very very morbidly satirical. One of the best books in English to come out of the 18th century.

Great fantastical satire.