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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.5
EAN num: 9780141439495
ISBN number: 0141439491
Label: Penguin Classics
Manufacturer: Penguin Classics
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 336
Printing Date: February 25, 2003
Publishing house: Penguin Classics
Sale Popularity Level: 10130
Studio: Penguin Classics
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Product Description:
Shipwrecked castaway Lemuel Gulliver's encounters with the petty, diminutive Lilliputians, the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted scientists of Laputa, the philosophical Houyhnhnms, and the brutish Yahoos give him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Swift's fantastic and subversive book remains supremely relevant in our own age of distortion, hypocrisy, and irony.
Edited with an Introduction by Robert DeMaria, Jr.
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Rated by buyers 
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I recently took a graduate course in topics of Modern philosophy and we read this book in great detail. I must disagree with those reveiwers who approach this book from a literary or English studies background and classify the book as satire. A very powerful case can be made that this book is highly philosophical. Swift even goes so far as to have Gulliver say that his log concerning his travels (i.e. the book) is directed to philosophers. Even had he not, one cannot overlook that Aristotle and Plato make their appearances (by name!) in the text.
What Swift is up to in Gulliver's Travels is a critique of Modern philosophy in so much as it diverges from Ancient philosophy. That is to say that the substance of the book examines the so-called "Ancients versus the Moderns" question. What Gulliver is ultimately doing is bound up with the image of the divided line and the allegory of the cave from Plato's Republic (books 6 and 7). Gulliver's travels are representative of what one endures when ascending from the cave and attempting to return back to it.
To see this book for what it is requires one to dismiss what the academy sees it as (mere satire or simply a kid's book) and read it on its own terms, therein one will find the profundity of Swift's thought.
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Satire is a staple of comedy shows on cable tv. However, the greatest satirist of the English language is not to be found in hilarious monologues on television. His name is Jonathan Swift. Swift was an Irish born bishop from Dublin who lived from 1667 to 1775. In his greatest piece of fiction "Gulliver's Travels" we see him as he punctures human prejudice, hatred, warfare and petty political bloviating!
The story is told through the pen of Dr. Lemuel Gulliver who is a ship's surgeon. Gulliver is gullible! Like Voltaire's Candide he learns through his outlandish travels the fraility of the human species.
Gulliver is shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput where the people are no more than six inches tall. He is a sense of wonder to the little people having never seen a person who is so tall. The islanders call him
Quinbus Flestrin or Great Man Mountain. Gulliver puts out a fire in the palace of the Queen by urinating on the burning building! He defeats the fleet of an enemy nation and is charged by treason by a faction at court.
Swiftian satire grills modern political faction by discussing the conflicts between the High Heels and Low Heels and the Big Egg Endians and the Little Egg Endians. He is poking fun at the London government.
Gulliver flees the island for England being reunited with his long suffering wife and family. The Lilliputians are as small minded as are people in our own society.
His subsequent trip takes him to a land the exact opposite of Lilliput. The
good Gulliver is shipwrecked and lands on an island. He is in a corn field forty feet high being threshed by giants. He is picked up by a farmer who takes him home in his pocket. Gulliver is given as a boy toy to the farmer's kind daughter Glumdalditch. He is in the land of giants known as Brobdingnag. He is later adpoted as a pet by the Queen. He is terrorized by mice, a vicious monkey and always fears falling out of the little box house which has been built for him. He learns the language of the kingdom but longs for home. After a terrible two years he is rescued when a bird picks up his box home with him in it and carries him out to sea where he is rescued. He returns home to England a wiser man.
Gulliver's third voyage account is the last of the four sections of the book written by Swift.It takes the gullible seadog from Nottinghamshire to the floating island of Laputa. The Laputans care only for music and mathematics. They are normal sized individuals who care nothing for the gentle emotions but are only interested in science and intellect. Servants hit them with huge bladders to keep them from their abstract musings. They have no practical abilities. They rule over their colony
Balnibarbi. They are quick to suppress any revolt against their power
The Laputans hurl huge rocks on their colony if any word is heard of revolt.
In this third part of the novel Gulliver finds time to visit Glubbdugdrib an island of sorcerers. Gulliver asks them to call up from the realm of the dead such luminaries as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar. Hannibal and Pompey the Great. Gulliver discovers that the history is the books is often not the real history which was lived. History is a pack of lies.
Gulliver also encounters a race of immortals with the odd name of the
Strulbrugs. Gulliver learns to his dismay that though they live for all time they grow weaker, uglier and more cynical with the passing years. One wonders what he would think of our culture which glorifies youth?
The fourth and final voyage of Gulliver occurs as he sails from England in 1710. Gulliver has become a captain but his crew mutinies and puts him in a small boat on the big ocean. He struggles to another weird island where he is captured by Yahoos who are ape-like inhabitants of this filthy land. He is rescued by the horse creatures who rule the land. They are called Houyhnhnms. They are an outstanding race of rational and kind
horses whom Gulliver comes to love. They view Gulliver as a Yahoo and he is banished from their paradise. Gulliver had earlier related to their king how cruelty and power politics is the norm in European civilization. He is set adrift in the sea where he is rescued by a ship from Portugal commanded by the kind captain Pedro de Mendez.
After this fourth and final voyage Gulliver has become a misanthrope who prefers the company of horses to humans. He is upset at the cruelty of humankind to animals and one another. Gulliver began as an innocent optimist but the book ends with its view of a very disillusioned man.
Gulliver's Travels can be read at many levels but at its core is a savage indictment of man's cruelty to man. Jonathan Swift was a pacifist and a kindly churchman. One shudders to think what this prophetic sage would think of our world today!
Rated by buyers 
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I really enjoyed reading through Gulliver's Travels, I recommend it to anybody who's trying to get a good grasp on the classics and learn to enjoy some literature, but for those of you who just want to sit down at the beach and relax, this might not be the book for you. Despite the numerous versions of Gulliver's Travels flying around billed as Adventure Stories, you must remember that Swift was a satirist and Gulliver's travels is really just a large allegory. Keep in mind it's a satire from a few hundred years ago. You may find yourself lost in names and connections that would have been obvious (and perhaps very clever) to the original audience but keeps the modern day reader flipping through to the foot and end notes. The most interesting parts are the first, second and fourth parts, while the third gets a little dry. When he gets into the narrative of the story, it is very interesting and again a very important piece in literature.
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Gulliver's Travels is definetely an interesting read. The changes pace frequently because the book is divided into four books according to his different adventures. Each book(adventure)gives you a differnt view of people and questions about humans and humanity. The last book was my personal favorite-it's a very differnet spin on humanity from the other ones. Overall, it's a very good book and I would recommend it if you need a book to read or have only ever read the children's version.
Rated by buyers -
This was excellent. I didn't think I'd ever want to read Gulliver's Travels, the eighteenth century English satire by Jonathan Swift. But I couldn't put the book down. Now it was much a satire on the then current English royal system but what he writes can really almost be a satire on any political system. You can transpose it to be a satire on any American President.
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