Reading the World: Ideas That Matter

by Michael Austin

A wide selection of classic Western and non-Western texts allows students to explore the development of ideas at different times and in different cultures.
From Lao Tzu to Aristotle, Charles Darwin to Jomo Kenyatta, Reading the World is a collection of 79 texts by some of the world's great thinkers. And because ideas have long been expressed visually as well as verbally, the collection includes 15 drawings, paintings, photographs, and other visual works. Organized around universal themes, and featuring a wide selection of both Western and non-Western texts, Reading the World presents a diversity of views on ideas that matter.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Textbooks, Writing, Classics, Anthologies, Education

704 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2006

About the author

I am an English professor who became an administrator who dreams of being a political pundit. After eleven years teaching English and writing books like this, I accepted a position as the Provost and Academic Vice President at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas. All the while, though, I dreamed of being a talking head. Soon after moving into administration, I started to write the Founderstein Blog, which examines contemporary politics from a historical perspective. My most recent book is That's Not What They Meant Reclaiming the Founding Fathers from America's Right Wing, a 75,000 word op-ed piece that treats the misuse of history by conservative politicians and media personalities.

Reviews

[Wren]

I have taught over 30 readings in this book: some to first year students and some to writing tutors in training. This book covers a variety of topics from a good range of centuries and cultural perspectives. The selections also range from short, medium and long. It's a great compromise between the Great Books tradition and the multicultural perspective. Asian and Muslim texts are better represented than in competing anthologies.

Also, the writers are not placed in identity politics ghettos. For example, the women are not all in a chapter on feminism; the spiritual leaders are not all in a chapter on religion; and the black writers are not all in a chapter on civil rights.

The rhetoric chapter in the back presents very clear yet specific advice on how to compose an academic argument. The editors' introductions give a good context for the readings.

My students' favorite readings were by Lao Tzu, Hsun Tzu, Mo Tzu, Machiavelli, de Pizan, Harding, Ghandi and June Jordan.

[Phillip]

Dr. Austin's anthology is a really top notch collection of (excerpts of) key theoretical, philosophical, religious, and political texts from across time and civilizations. The editor's introduction to each piece/author provides a good smattering of background information about the time, place, and conditions that prompted the document, and the study questions can provide useful aids for examining various meanings. What is especially interesting about this anthology is the way that texts work in dialogue with one another, the sections focused around thematic concepts rather than chronologically or by geographic place.

However, the problem with this anthology is the problem inherent to all anthologies--the information about documents is not a complete picture, the study questions can offer students limited or rigid ways of thinking about a text, and excerts always alter the feeling of a text. Also, the dialogue between texts is somewhat artificial because these texts do not directly address one another, which means that some of the conceptual links must be explained. But again, these are flaws inherent to the anthology, and not particular to this anthology. Just be cautious about how you present texts if you use any anthology as a teaching tool.

[Jenny]

We have just adopted this textbook for our comp sequence beginning in fall 08. I'm really excited about teaching it, though it will be something of a challenge to get organized and prepped for it.

[Rashaan]

Wary of teaching the typical reading assignments on gun control, obesity or the other myriad of contemporary issues that proliferate among most composition readers, I turned to this impressive text that spans Lao Tzu to Arundhati Roy. Surprisingly enough the students took these classic and dense texts and ran with it. They seemed to really enjoy Mo Tzu's treatise, "Against Music," struggled with Wollstonecraft's prose, though they appreciated that centuries later we're practicing the very ideals she strove for, and many students loved wrestling with Hardin's "Lifeboat Ethics" and Hsun Tzu's "Man's Nature is Evil." So far, this seems to be the best reader anthology that I've worked with, though, I fear not every class may be so open minded and engaged with such canonical work.

[Yinzadi]

Table of Contents (4th Edition)

PART 1: READING THE WORLD

*indicates new selection

[*]indicates visual text


1. EDUCATION

HSÜN TZU, Encouraging Learning

SENECA, On Liberal and Vocational Studies

[*] LAURENTIUS DE VOLTOLINA, Lecture of Henricus de Alemania

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, Learning to Read

VIRGINIA WOOLF, Shakespeare’s Sister

GLORIA ANZALDÚA, How to Tame a Wild Tongue

MARTHA NUSSBAUM, Education for Profit, Education for Democracy


2. HUMAN NATURE AND THE MIND

*THE BUDDHA, from the Dhammapada

MENCIUS, Man’s Nature Is Good

HSÜN TZU, Man’s Nature Is Evil

THOMAS HOBBES, from Leviathan

*HANNAH ARENDT, The Human Condition

[*] CARL JUNG, from The Red Book

NICHOLAS CARR, A Thing Like Me


3. LANGUAGE AND RHETORIC

[*] AESCHYLUS, The Eumenides

PLATO, from Gorgias

ARISTOTLE, from Rhetoric

*CICERO, Stating a Case

*JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, Eloquence Is the Child of Liberty

*[*] CESARE MACCARI, Cicero Denounces Catiline

*AUDRE LORDE, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action

*AMY TAN, The Language of Discretion


4. THE ARTS

*[*] ABORIGINAL ROCK DRAWINGS

LADY MURASAKI SHIKIBU, On the Art of the Novel

*SEI SHONAGON, from The Pillow Book

EDMUND BURKE, from The Sublime and Beautiful

[*] WILLIAM BLAKE, The Tyger

LEO TOLSTOY, from What Is Art?

*GERTRUDE STEIN, What Are Masterpieces and Why Are There so Few of Them?

*CHINUA ACHEBE, African Literature as Restoration of Celebration

*[*] MBARI SHRINE HOUSE


5. SCIENCE AND NATURE

LUCRETIUS, from De Rerum Natura

MATSUO BASHŌ, The Narrow Road to the Interior

CHARLES DARWIN, from Natural Selection; or, the Survival of the Fittest

RACHEL CARSON, The Obligation to Endure

*TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS, Clan of the One-Breasted Women

*JARED DIAMOND, Twilight at Easter from Collapse

*[*] EASTER ISLAND MOAI

VANDANA SHIVA, from Soil, Not Oil


6. LAW AND GOVERNMENT

LAO TZU, from the Tao Te Ching

*THULYDIDES, The Melian Dialogue

*TACITUS, The Speech of Calgacus

CHRISTINE DE PIZAN, from The Treasure of the City of Ladies

NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, from The Prince

[*] ABRAHAM BOSSE, Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan

JAMES MADISON, Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments

*TAWFIQ AL-HAKIM, Dialogue from The Sultan’s Dilemma

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., Letter from Birmingham Jail

DESMOND TUTU, Nuremberg or National Amnesia: A Third Way


7. WEALTH, POVERTY, AND SOCIAL CLASS

*THE LAWS OF MANU

EPICTETUS, To Those Who Fear Want

PO-CHÜ-I, The Flower Market

THOMAS MALTHUS, from An Essay on the Principle of Population

MOHANDAS GANDHI, Economic and Moral Progress

*MARGARET SANGER, The Case for Birth Control

[*] DOROTHEA LANGE, Migrant Mother

*RIGOBERTA MENCHU, from I, Rigoberta Menchu

JOSEPH STIGLITZ, Rent Seeking and the Making of an Unequal Society


*8. ETHICS AND EMPATHY

*CONFUCIUS, from The Analects

*THE QU’RAN, The Chambers

*SHANTIDEVA, The Way of the Bodhisattva

*ADAM SMITH, from The Theory of Moral Sentiments

*JEREMY BENTHAM, The Principle of Utility

*[*]KATHE KOLLWITZ, Need

*MARTIN BUBER, from I and Thou

*URSULA K. LE GUIN, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

*CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions

*PAUL BLOOM, Against Empathy


*9. CASEBOOK OF VISUAL ARGUMENTS

*[*]CENTENNIAL COLLEGE, Ad Campaign (Education)

*[*]BANKSY, Slave Labour (The Arts)

*[*]UN WOMEN, The Autocomplete Truth (Language and Rhetoric)

*[*]WORLD MAPPER, Carbon Emission Cartograms (Science and Nature)

*[*]DANIEL CRUMRINE AND SEAN LEONARD, The Last Lockdown (Ethics and Empathy)

*[*]HANS ROSLING, Factfulness Infant Mortality Graphs (Wealth, Poverty, and Social Class)


PART 2: A GUIDE TO READING AND WRITING

10. READING IDEAS

11. GENERATING IDEAS

12. STRUCTURING IDEAS

13. SUPPORTING IDEAS

14. SYNTHESIZING IDEAS

15. INCORPORATING IDEAS

16. REVISING AND EDITING

[Corey Wozniak]

I read the third edition (found it used, cheap). I've since bought the fifth edition, and plan to read the new essays there.

Favorites (some I've read before, or even read many times; some I read for the first time here):
- Frederick Douglass, "Learning to Read"
- Virginia Woolf, "Shakespeare's Sister"
- Plato, "The Speech of Aristophanes"
- Ruth Benedict, "The Individual and the Pattern of Culture"
- Nicholas Carr, "A Thing Like Me"
- Edmund Buke, "The Sublime and Beautiful"
- Leo Tolstoy, "What is Art?"
- Elaine Scarrh, "On Beauty and Being Just"
- Karl Popper, "Science as Falsification"
- James Madison, "Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments"
- MLK, "Letter from Birmingham Jail"
- Obama, "A More Perfect Union"
- Desiderius Erasmus, "Against War"

[Dawn]

Love it so far! My class has ended so I will be returning this to my college bookstore soon. I would love to own this for myself and explore the myriad of other amazing essays in this book!

Five stars!

[Brenna Wiggin]

mehhhh (for school)

[Kurami Rocket]

I had to read this for my English 104 course and from what I read, I really liked most of it. Not all of the texts were easy to read and some I had a hard time making out what the author tried to say, thus, I had to conduct more research to try and understand its meaning; however, this book introduced me to many people and real world events I had previously not heard of. Of course, this is simply an introduction, so one must conduct thorough and more detailed research to get all the facts about the people and events here. Especially as to not be biased or lack all details. Still though, a pretty solid read.

[Michael Pierce]

I have read many "reader" books throughout college and this is by far one of the most comprehensive and well thought in the field of humanities.

This book brings together many great authors, artists, and ideas from very different cultures and eras.

I would argue this book is a must have if you are interested in studying the humanities (specifically English, art, history, and philosophy).

I personally purchased many books because of the short snip-its available in Reading the World.

[Graham Oliver]

Good book for teaching a low-level writing course due to the variety. I supplemented some writing on sexuality, aging, and living in a postmodern era, but otherwise good. Especially a fan of the ability to pair two readings from this which speak to each other closely (Locke+Hobbes, Mead+Orwell, Machiavelli+Pizan, etc.).

[Bob Conner]

Michael Austin's works are not only very readable and enjoyable, they clearly offer much to consider and apply to one's dealings with the world around us. I've read most of his work and look forward to additional reading from him.

[Willy]

This book was a requirement for my English class. I loved it. All the pieces of writing, were short and straight to the point.

[Britney]

Great book to highlight many important pieces of literature. Had to read this for an English class and was not disappointed! I purchased several great books after reading their summaries in here.