In this book, three outstanding readers from different industries lead readers to approach 30 classic humanities and social sciences books that people are familiar with but may not have read or may not be able to understand. These works belong to various fields, such as "The Birth of Tragedy" in the field of philosophy, "Emile" in the field of pedagogy, and "The Wealth of Nations" in the field of economics. I wonder how many books you've all read? Or how many books have you read? In my opinion, this book has two major functions, one is that for books that you have not read, you can understand whether there are knowledge points that you are interested in through interpretation, and the other is that for books you have read, you can further review and review the knowledge points through the author's system combing.
The interpretation of classic works in this book mainly includes the following: the author's life, writing background, core ideas and keywords. Through this interpretation structure, the author's living environment and the ins and outs of the work can be understood very thoroughly. Truly "know what it is, know why it is so".
Here are two examples to give you an idea of the structure of the book. The first is Emile, which I haven't read yet. Readers interpret and analyze this work under the title of "Emile: What Kind of Education Children Really Need". From the interpretation, it can be seen that the birth of this work is inevitable and contradictory. Rousseau's childhood had the experience of ice and fire, and his life was happy before the age of 10, and he followed his father to read a large number of ancient Greek and Roman classics. But after the age of 10, his father ran away because of a dispute, Rousseau suddenly fell from the honeypot into the ice cave, he was abused by the apprentice's master, and then wandered around, and at the age of 16, he was raised by Madame Warren, who was 12 years older than him. From this point of view, rousseau was able to write such a work of children's education as Emile, whose childhood was not treated correctly, and he wrote such an ideal into literature. But he wrote this work against an incomprehensible background, which is that he sent all five of his children to a welfare home. Maybe it's really forced by poverty. However, the work "Emile" advocates treating children as "natural persons", and such an educational concept is very tolerant and advanced even today.
The other is The Birth of Tragedy, which I have read but have not fully understood. Nietzsche was a philosopher I was very interested in. In this reading the author uses the subtitle "Romance or madness, this is a problem." Many people will call Nietzsche crazy, and in the work "The Birth of Tragedy", Nietzsche's whimsical philosophical ideas are highlighted. The interpretation says that the core of the study of this book is "what is the spirit of tragedy". The author believes that the so-called tragic spirit is a combination of the spirit of the sun god who dares to face reality and the spirit of Dionysus who can escape from reality. The text says: "In Nietzsche's view, the sun god and dionysus are like a man and a woman, and it takes to give birth to a great artistic realm when they intercourse with each other..." The comparison of the sun god and the god of wine to a man and a woman I did not read in the book "The Birth of Tragedy", this point of view made my understanding of this book more intuitive.
As Calvino said, "Every rereading of the classics, like the first reading, is a voyage of discovery," it is true that the classics should be worth reading repeatedly. However, because of time constraints, many times even if we read the classics, we are still sloppy and swallow dates, so starting today, take this book as an opportunity to re-read and peruse the classics.