With all the projects I am working on, I'm still going to add one more: A survey of all of human knowledge in ten books!
Over the next year I'm going to read 10 books specifically intended to cover as much general knowledge as possible, while still insisting that the books be written in an interesting, enjoyable, and relatively easy-to-understand way.
Most of these books I have read before, but a couple will be new to me.
With thanks, and apologies, to Mr. Dewey Decimal, my own division of all human knowledge goes like this:
- Natural Sciences
- Social Sciences
- Languages
- Literatures
- Arts
- Technologies
- Religions
- History
- Philosophy
- General knowledge or mixed works
So, if we read one book in each of these areas then, within a year, we should have vast stores of general knowledge, which is valuable in its own right, and also gives us the critical raw materials for becoming better thinkers.
Let’s go!
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Book #1: Natural Sciences
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
Timothy Ferris
[Note: Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris. I hope you will buy and enjoy this brilliant popular science book. If you click on this link to buy it, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support.]
I will start with the Natural Sciences. The book "Coming of Age in the Milky Way" was published when I was 25 years old. I have read it at least twice and I believe it is the best popular science book I have ever read. If a person were only going to read one science book in their life, I would recommend this one.
The first sentence of the preface explains the author's purpose: "This book purports to tell the story of how, through the workings of science, our species has arrived at its current estimation of the dimensions of cosmic space and time."
How big is the universe?
How old is the universe?
Scientists have found answers to these questions after thousands of years of study.
This book describes how they did it.
In the early chapters of this book Ferris describes what ancient people thought about the universe so we can see how far we have come. In early cities tall buildings were built for priests to climb and study the heavens, because the builders thought a tall building would get the priests significantly closer to the heavenly bodies. At least two ancient thinkers thought the sun was about the size of a shield, and if it was that small, they could not have thought it was too far away. In Ptolemy’s model, which was accepted for more than a thousand years, the entire universe would have fit inside of the Earth’s orbit around the sun.
A lot of the history of Astronomy is just the record of how scientists gradually learned how gigantic the universe really is.
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Book #2: Social Sciences
The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers Robert L. Heilbroner
[Note: The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner. I hope you will buy and enjoy this great survey of the classic thinkers in economics. If you click on this link to buy it, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support.]
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Book #3: Languages
The Elements of Style
William Strunk, Jr.; E.B. White
[Note: The Elements of Style by William Strunk. Revised by E.B. White. I hope you will buy and enjoy this classic book on the proper use of English. If you click on this link to buy it, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support.]
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Book #4: Literatures
A Little History of Literature
John Sutherland
[Note: A Little History of Literature by John Sutherland. I hope you will buy and enjoy this fantastic survey of literature. If you click on this link to buy it, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support.]
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Book #5: Arts
Civilization
Kenneth Clark
[Note: Civilization by Kenneth Clark. I hope you will buy and enjoy this dazzling study of civilization through great works of art. If you click on this link to buy it, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support.]
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Book #6: Technologies
The Soul of a New Machine
Tracy Kidder
[Note: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. I hope you will buy and enjoy this masterpiece about the development of a new computer. If you click on this link to buy it, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support.]
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Book #7: Religions
The World’s Religions
Huston Smith
[Note: The World’s Religions by Huston Smith. I hope you will buy and enjoy this masterpiece about the development of a new computer. If you click on this link to buy it, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support.]
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Book #8: History
The Penguin History of the World, 6th ed.
J.M. Roberts; Odd Arne Westad
[Note: The Penguin History of the World by J.M. Roberts. Revised by Odd Arne Westad. I hope you will buy and enjoy this sweeping history of the entire world. If you click on this link to buy it, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support.]
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Book #9: Philosophy
The Story of Philosophy
Will Durant
[Note: The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant. I hope you will buy and enjoy this great introduction to some of the most important philosophers in the history of Western Civilization. If you click on this link to buy it, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support.]
This is the best introductory philosophy book I have ever read. Written by Will Durant, and published in 1926, this book is a classic that everybody should read and anybody can understand.
Durant covers some of the greatest philosophers in the history of Western Civilization including Plato and Aristotle from ancient Greece, Spinoza and Immanuel Kant from early modern Europe, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey from the 20th Century, and several more.
For each philosopher Durant tells us about their lives and the culture they lived in, and then he gives us quick and easy-to-understand introductions to some of their greatest ideas.
Some of these ideas might seem strange to us, but many of them will seem familiar, because these are the thinkers who have created and maintained the foundations of the world we still live in today. The more we know about these philosophers, the better we will understand our own civilization.
This book begins with the three giants of ancient Greek philosophy: Socrates, who believed that if people KNOW what is really good then they will do it, so all we really have to do is teach them; Plato who wrote a whole book, The Republic, about how to create a good society by ensuring that the best people will be its rulers; and Aristotle, who studied everything, and started most of the branches of knowledge that college students still major in today, including, perhaps most importantly, the study of logic itself, so we can have confidence that our thinking is leading us to the truth and not just into a morass of confusion.
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Book #10: General Knowledge
A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future
Charles Van Doren
[Note: A History of Knowledge by Charles Van Doren. I hope you will buy and enjoy this amazing review of how the human race has come to know the things we do know. If you click on this link to buy it, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for your support.]
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If you want to support Anything Smart, please click on the book links in this post and make a purchase. This set of ten books will give anyone a huge amount of general knowledge. A good supplement to any education. If you buy any of these books through this blog, Anything Smart will earn a commission. Thanks for visiting my blog, and thanks for your support!
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Copyright © 2021 by Joseph Wayne Gadway
