Gulliver's Travels

ISBN: 1441764119

Author: Jonathan Swift

Condition: New

Product Description This timeless satirical fantasy hits movie theaters December 22, 2010, starring Jack Black, Emily Blunt, Jason Segal, and Amanda Peet. This enduring classic tells of the fantastic voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, an English ship's surgeon who becomes a castaway in strange and faraway lands. Shipwrecked upon the shores of Lilliput, he encounters the six-inch-high Lilliputians, whose petty wars, civil strife, and vanities are human follies so reduced in scale as to be rendered ridiculous. From there he travels on to Brobdingnag, where he finds himself surrounded by crude giants who cannot appreciate his abstract intellect and prefer to display him as a curiosity. Further voyages take Gulliver to the floating island of Laputa, a land of intellectuals who are ignorant of practical life, and to the Island of Sorcerers, who share with him the lies of history. Finally, he visits the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of wise and gentle horses served by degenerate human-like creatures. Gulliver's travels are entertaining adventures that also offer him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Both an amusing fantasy and a devastating satire of society, Gulliver's Travels is as witty and relevant in our own age of hypocrisy and irony as it was in Swift's eighteenth century. Review One of the masterpieces of satire among the world's literature... --Masterpieces of World LiteratureA multifarious book, it is various in its appeal: it is enchantingly playful and fantastic and is often read by children; it is a witty, allegorical depiction of the political life and values of Swift's time; it is a bitter denunciation of mankind; finally it is Swift's reflections on man's corruption of his highest attribute, reason. --The Reader's EncyclopediaA masterwork of irony. . . . that contains both a dark and bitter meaning and a joyous, extraordinary creativity of imagination. That's why it has lived for so long. --Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE (1932-2000), British author and academic About the Author JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745) was an Anglo-Irish priest, author, journalist, political pamphleteer, and poet. He is primarily known as a prose satirist for such works as ''A Modest Proposal''. The dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral from 1713, he was considered Dublin's foremost citizen.