The world in books: 52 works of great short nonfiction

Introduction : "books are weapons in the war of ideas"

Dated before the common era (BCE). The epic of Gilgamesh / author uknown ; The book of Genesis / author uknown ; Tao Te Ching (The book of the way) / Lao-tzu (attributed) ; Stung with love : poems and fragments / Sappho ; The art of war / Sun Tzu or Sun Tzi (attributed) ; The symposium / Plato ; The poetics (how to tell a story) / Aristotle ; The Bhagavad Gita / Vyasa (attributed)

Dated in the common era (CE). The gospel according to Luke / author uknown ; Meditations / Marcus Aurelius ; The Qur-an : "the cow" / Muhammad (attributed) ; Vita nuova / Dante Alighieri ; Utopia / Thomas More ; The prince / Niccoḷ Machiavelli ; The sovereignty and goodness of God / Mary Rowlandson ; Treatise on toleration / Voltaire ; The age of reason : being an investigation of true and fabulous theology / Thomas Paine ; Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave / Frederick Douglass ; The communist manifesto / Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ; Civil disobedience / Henry David Thoreau ; Incidents in the life of a slave girl : written by herself / Harriet Jacobs ; On lynchings / Ida B. Wells-Barnett ; The souls of Black folf / W. E. B. Du Bois ; The world I live in / Helen Keller ; A room of one's own / Virginia Woolf ; The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas / Gertrude Stein ; Homage to Catalonia / George Orwell ; A chill in the air: an Italian war diary, 1939-1940 / Iris Origo ; Under the sea-wind / Rachel Carson ; The myth of Sisyphus / Albert Camus ; Hiroshima / John Hersey ; Man's search for meaning / Viktor E. Frankl ; Night / Elie Weisel ; The fire next time / James Baldwin ; A very easy death / Simoe de Beauvoir ; A moveable feast / Ernest Hemingway ; The courage to create / Rollo May ; On photography / Susan Sontag ; The gnostic gospels / Elane Pagels ; Amusing ourselves to death : public discourse in the age of show business / Neil Postman ; The writing life / Annie Dillard ; The journalist and the murderer / Janet Malcolm ; All about love : new visions / bell hooks ; Nickel and dimed : on (not) getting by in America / Barbara Ehrenreich ; Letters to a young contrarian / Christopher Hitchens ; Persepolis: the story of a childhood / Marjane Satrapi ; The year of magical thinking / Joan Didion ; Food rules: an eater's manual / Michael Pollan ; We should all be feminists / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ; On tyranny : twenty lessons from the Twentieth century / Timothy Snyder ; The origin of others / Toni Morrison ; Under a white sky: the nature of the future / Elizabeth Kolbert

Afterword : what is not here and what I learned

Appendix I : my ten favorite great short nonfiction books

Appendix II : 52 more of the great short books that make us think.