On August 8, 2011, Jonathan Yardley spoke at Politics & Prose about his book, Second Reading: Notable Neglected Books Revisited (Europa, $16).
It’s hard enough to keep up with all the new books coming out—but when
you consider the titles you’ve overlooked through the years, the task is
truly daunting. From 2003 until January 2010, The Washington Post’s
book critic offered an occasional, selective look at books worth going
back to. Now some of these essays have been collected—here’s great
reading on great reading.
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On October 4, 2011, Stephen Greenblatt spoke at Politics & Prose about his book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W. W. Norton, $26.95).
Could a book change the world? In Stephen Greenblatt’s illuminating study of the Renaissance, the answer is yes, and the book is On the Nature of Things by the Roman philosopher Lucretius. Greenblatt, a Harvard Shakespeare scholar and author of the bestselling Will in the World, presents Lucretius’s ideas, shows whom they impressed and why, and demonstrates their pivotal and ongoing influence.
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On September 16, 2011, Sylvia Nasar spoke at Politics & Prose about her book, Grand Pursuit, in which she follows her bestselling biography, A Beautiful Mind, by showing thinkers in action. From Alfred Marshall walking around Dickens’s London to Sen in today’s India, Nasar’s narrative history of political economics lays out the challenges society has faced since the industrial revolution proved that socio-economic status wasn’t a given, but lay within human power to change.
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