Books like 'The Ascent of Man'
Readers who enjoyed The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
historical psychological 20th century evolution classics technology archaeology ancient-civilization outdoors religion
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Death and the Dervish by Meša Selimović
Rated: 4.55 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsDeath and the Dervish is an acclaimed novel by Bosnian writer Mesa Selimovic. It recounts the story of Sheikh Nuruddin, a dervish residing in an Islamic monastery in Sarajevo in the eighteenth century during the Ottoman Turk hegemony over the Balkans. When his brother is arrested, he must descend into the Kafkaesque world of the Ottoman authorities in his search to discover what happened to him... -
![Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry]()
Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 24 ratings"This is a book about Heaven," says Jayber Crow, "but I must say too that . . . I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about Hell." It is 1932 and he has returned to his native Port William to become the town's barber... -
![The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis]()
The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 66 ratingsAlternative cover for ISBN: 978-0-00-746123-3C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce is a classic Christian allegorical tale about a bus ride from hell to heaven. An extraordinary meditation upon good and evil, grace and judgment, Lewis’s revolutionary idea in the The Great Divorce is that the gates of Hell are locked from the inside... -
![Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis]()
Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
Rated: 4.36 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsMere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters, two of C. S. Lewis's most important and enduring works, are now available in this stunning, collectible hardcover edition. The most popular of C. S. Lewis's works of non-fiction, Mere Christianity, has sold several million copies worldwide... -
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![Foundation by Isaac Asimov]()
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 49 ratingsFor twelve thousand years the Galactic Empire has ruled supreme. Now it is dying. But only Hari Seldon, creator of the revolutionary science of psychohistory, can see into the future -- to a dark age of ignorance, barbarism, and warfare that will last thirty thousand years...Categorized as:
classics religion technology university 20th-century action-adventure adult audiobook -
![The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso, Tim Parks]()
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso, Tim Parks
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsPresenting the stories of Zeus and Europa, Theseus and Ariadne, the birth of Athens and the fall of Troy, in all their variants, Calasso also uncovers the distant origins of secrets and tragedy, virginity, and rape. "A perfect work like no other. (Calasso) has re-created . . . the morning of our world."--Gore Vidal. 15 engravings... -
![Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis]()
Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Rated: 4.18 of 5 stars · 53 ratingsIn this timeless tale of two mortal princesses- one beautiful and one unattractive- C.S. Lewis reworks the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche into an enduring piece of contemporary fiction. This is the story of Orual, Psyche's embittered and ugly older sister, who posessively and harmfully loves Psyche...Categorized as:
ancient-civilization classics religion university 20th-century action-adventure audiobook book -
![The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 by Samuel Beckett]()
The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 by Samuel Beckett
Rated: 4.21 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsNobel prize winner Samuel Beckett is one of the most profoundly original writers of our century. He gives expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature... -
![The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham]()
The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsBased on the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence is W. Somerset Maugham's ode to the powerful forces behind creative genius. Charles Strickland is a staid banker, a man of wealth and privilege. He is also a man possessed of an unquenchable desire to create art... -
![The Town by William Faulkner]()
The Town by William Faulkner
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsContinues Faulkner's tale of the Snopes family, set in rural, post-bellum Mississippi... -
![The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot]()
The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot
Rated: 4.29 of 5 stars · 14 ratings"This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper." 'The Hollow Men' is a poem by T. S. Eliot written in 1925, divided into five parts and consists of 98 lines. Eliot's New York Times obituary in 1965 identified the final four as "probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English"...Categorized as:
classics university fiction 20th-century existentialism historical philosophy psychological -
![Roman Fever (and Other Stories) by Edith Wharton]()
Roman Fever (and Other Stories) by Edith Wharton
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA Virago Modern Classic These stories - all powerful moral analyses - demonstrate the true professionalism of Edith Wharton... -
![Fatelessness by Imre Kertész]()
Fatelessness by Imre Kertész
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsAt the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew... -
![Silence by Shūsaku Endō]()
Silence by Shūsaku Endō
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 26 ratings"In my opinion one of the finest novels of our time." - Graham GreeneShusaku Endo is Japan's foremost novelist, and Silence is generally regarded to be his masterpiece. In a perfect fusion of treatment and theme, this powerful novel tells the story of a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest in Japan at the height of the fearful persecution of the small Christian community... -
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![The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter]()
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsDespite the enormous success--both critical and popular--of her novel Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter's reputation as one of America's most distinguished writers rest chiefly on her superb short stories. This volume brings together the collections Flowering Judas; Pale Horse, Pale Rider; and The Leaning Tower as well as four stories not available elsewhere in book form.Go little book.. -
![On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin]()
On the Black Hill by Bruce Chatwin
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsLewis and Benjamin Jones, identical twins, were born with the century on a farm on the English-Welsh border. For eighty years they live on the farm--sharing the same clothes, tilling the same soil, sleeping in the same bed. Their lives and the lives of their neighbors--farmers, drovers, clergymen, traders, coffin-makers--are only obliquely touched by the chaos of twentieth-century progress... -
![The Fratricides by Nikos Kazantzakis]()
The Fratricides by Nikos Kazantzakis
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe Fratricides by the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis recounts the tragic violence that swallowed the Greek countryside in the civil war of the late 1940s. Castello, a village in Epirus is not spared all the death and destruction which culminated during the Holy Week... -
![The Secret Miracle by Jorge Luis Borges]()
The Secret Miracle by Jorge Luis Borges
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 6 ratings"The Secret Miracle" is a short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It was first published in the magazine Sur in February 1943. The main character of the story is a playwright named Jaromir Hladík, who is living in Prague when it is occupied by the Nazis during World War II... -
![المجنون by Kahlil Gibran]()
المجنون by Kahlil Gibran
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsالترجمة الوحيدة التي أقرها جبرانThis thought-provoking collection of strange, subtle, but meaningful parables casts an ironic light on the beliefs, hopes, and vanities of humankind... -
![Quicksand and Passing by Nella Larsen]()
Quicksand and Passing by Nella Larsen
Rated: 3.94 of 5 stars · 18 ratings"Quicksand and Passing are novels I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable."--Alice Walker"Discovering Nella Larsen is like finding lost money with no name on it. One can enjoy it with delight and share it without guilt... -
![Abel Sanchez and Other Stories by Miguel de Unamuno]()
Abel Sanchez and Other Stories by Miguel de Unamuno
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsA book to challenge the status quo, spark a debate, and get people talking about the issues and questions we face as a... -
![The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIII: A Vision: The Original 1925 Version: Volume 13 by W.B. Yeats]()
The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume XIII: A Vision: The Original 1925 Version: Volume 13 by W.B. Yeats
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThe Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume XIII: A Vision is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholar George Bornstein and formerly the late Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. One of the strangest works of literary modernism, A Vision is Yeats's greatest occult work. Edited by Yeats scholars Catherine E... -
![Waterland by Graham Swift]()
Waterland by Graham Swift
Rated: 3.90 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsSet in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy... -
![The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick]()
The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsDepicting both the horrors of the Holocaust and the lifetime of emptiness that pursues a survivor, 'The Shawl' and 'Rosa' recall the psychological and emotional scars of those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis... -
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![Fräulein Else by Arthur Schnitzler]()
Fräulein Else by Arthur Schnitzler
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA young woman is contacted by her mother, begging her to save her father from debtor's jail by visiting an elderly acquaintance in order to borrow money. This novel shows how the demands of her family force Else into the realization that everything has a price and morality has a most brittle veneer... -
![Amongst Women by John McGahern]()
Amongst Women by John McGahern
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsMoran is an old Republican whose life was forever transformed by his days of glory as a guerilla leader in the War of Independence. Now, in old age, living out in the country, Moran is still fighting - with his family, his friends, even himself - in a poignant struggle to come to terms with the past... -
![Swann in Love by Marcel Proust]()
Swann in Love by Marcel Proust
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThe newest translation of the classic of French literature From the text: But at the age Swann was approaching, where one is already a little disillusioned and where he knows to be content at being in love simply for the pleasure of it, without demanding too much in return, this coming together of two hearts, if it is no longer, as it was in one's youth, the goal that love, by necessity, tends... -
![Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man by U.R. Ananthamurthy]()
Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man by U.R. Ananthamurthy
Rated: 3.86 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsMade into a powerful, award-winning film in 1970, this important Kannada novel of the sixties has received widespread acclaim from both critics and general readers since its first publication in 1965... -
![Youth Without Youth & Other Novellas (Romanian Literature & Thought in Translation) by Mircea Eliade]()
Youth Without Youth & Other Novellas (Romanian Literature & Thought in Translation) by Mircea Eliade
Rated: 3.93 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsBucharest, 1938: while Hitler gains power in Germany, the Romanian police start arresting students they suspect of belonging to the Iron Guard. Meanwhile, a man who has spent his life studying languages, poetry, and history - a man who thought his life was over - lies in a hospital bed, inexplicably alive and miraculously healthy, trying to figure out how to conceal his identity... -
![American Pastoral by Philip Roth]()
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 38 ratingsPulitzer Prize Winner (1998)In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss... -
![The Counterfeiters by André Gide]()
The Counterfeiters by André Gide
Rated: 3.85 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsOriginally published in 1925, this book became known for the frank sexuality of its contents and its account of middle class French morality. The themes of the book explore the problem of morals, the problem of society and the problems facing writers. An appendix to this edition (Vintage, 1973) contains excerpts from the Gide's notebooks which he kept while writing this book... -
![Titmuss Regained by John Mortimer]()
Titmuss Regained by John Mortimer
Rated: 3.75 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsThe Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss has clawed his way up the Tory government ranks and is now Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning (H.E.A.P.), and in pursuit of beautiful widow Jenny Sidonia. But seismic changes are afoot in the beautiful countryside where a new town threatens to engulf his own back garden... -
![The Hamlet by William Faulkner]()
The Hamlet by William Faulkner
Rated: 3.83 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe Hamlet, the first novel of Faulkner's Snopes trilogy, is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Reconstruction. It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman's Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation... -
![Pan by Knut Hamsun]()
Pan by Knut Hamsun
Rated: 3.88 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsLieutenant Thomas Glahn, a hunter and ex-military man, lives alone in a hut in the forest with his faithful dog Aesop. Upon meeting Edvarda, the daughter of a merchant in a nearby town, they are both strongly attracted to each other, but neither understands the other's love... -
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![Severin's Journey into the Dark: A Prague Ghost Story by Paul Leppin]()
Severin's Journey into the Dark: A Prague Ghost Story by Paul Leppin
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsLeppin was the truly chosen bard of the painfully disappearing old Prague, its infamous side streets and debauched nights ... a poet of eternal disillusionment, he was at once a servant of the devil and an adorer of the Madonna.– Max BrodLeppin once wrote: “Prague remains my deepest experience... -
![Shame by Salman Rushdie]()
Shame by Salman Rushdie
Rated: 3.85 of 5 stars · 36 ratingsThe novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie’s phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is “not quite Pakistan... -
![Nemesis by Philip Roth]()
Nemesis by Philip Roth
Rated: 3.79 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsIn the “stifling heat of equatorial Newark,” a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, lifelong disability, and even death. This is the startling theme of Philip Roth’s wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children... -
![The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein]()
The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein
Rated: 3.78 of 5 stars · 17 ratingsWhen Renee Feuer goes to college, one of the first lessons she tries to learn is how to liberate herself from the restrictions of her orthodox Jewish background. As she discovers the pleasures of the body, Renee also learns about the excitements of the mind. She enrolls as a philosophy graduate student, then marries Noam Himmel, the world-renowned mathematician... -
![In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike]()
In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsOne hot afternoon in 1910, the Reverend Clarence Wilmot, standing in the rectory of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, experiences the last vestiges of his faith departing. True to this revelation, Clarence abandons the pulpit and becomes an encyclopedia salesman. What follows is the saga of the Wilmot family, one wandering tapestry thread within the American century... -
![Quartet by Jean Rhys]()
Quartet by Jean Rhys
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsThe story of a woman on the edge caught in the stranglehold between her lover and his wife. When her husband is released from prison, the situation explodes... -
![The Simple Past by Driss Chraïbi]()
The Simple Past by Driss Chraïbi
Rated: 3.50 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsThe Simple Past came out in 1954, and both in France and its author’s native Morocco the book caused an explosion of fury... -
![Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko]()
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
Rated: 3.79 of 5 stars · 40 ratings'An exceptional novel ... a cause for celebration' Washington Post'The most accomplished Native American writer of her generation' The New York Times Book Review Tayo, a young Second World War veteran of mixed ancestry, is coming home... -
![Mad Shadows by Marie-Claire Blais]()
Mad Shadows by Marie-Claire Blais
Rated: 3.60 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsA harrowing pathology of the soul, Mad Shadows centres on a family group: Patrice, the beautiful and narcissistic son; his ugly and malicious sister, Isabelle-Marie; and Louise, their vain and uncomprehending mother. These characters inhabit an amoral universe where beauty reflects no truth and love is an empty delusion. Each character is ultimately annihilated by their own obsessions... -
![Thérèse by François Mauriac]()
Thérèse by François Mauriac
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 19 ratingsFrom the moment she walks from court having been charged with attempting to poison her husband, to her banishment, escape to Paris, and final years of solitude and waiting, the life of Thérèse Desqueyroux is passionate and tortured. The victim of a hostile fate, Thérèse, as Mauriac said of her ‘belongs to that class of human beings … for whom night can end only when life itself ends... -
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![The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon]()
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
Rated: 3.70 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsMeet Moses, Galahad, Big City, Tolroy, Five Past Twelve, and other West Indians who have come to London in search of the dream. There to face a reality of racial discrimination, poverty, harsh winters, waiting to see what tomorrow brings. This novel both joyful and sad, is an ode to the survival instinct of the modern immigrant... -
![Indignation by Philip Roth]()
Indignation by Philip Roth
Rated: 3.71 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsAgainst the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life’s unimagined chances and terrifying consequences.It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College... -
![Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos]()
Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsConsidered by many to be John Dos Passos's greatest work, Manhattan Transfer is an "expressionistic picture of New York" (New York Times) in the 1920s that reveals the lives of wealthy power brokers and struggling immigrants alike... -
![Tristessa (Duluoz Legend) by Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan]()
Tristessa (Duluoz Legend) by Jack Kerouac, Aram Saroyan
Rated: 3.67 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsTristessa is the name with which Kerouac baptized Esperanza Villanueva, a Catholic Mexican young woman, a prostitute and addict to certain drugs, whom he fell in love with during one of his stays in Mexico -a country that he frequently visited - by the middle of the fifties... -
![Where Three Roads Meet by Salley Vickers]()
Where Three Roads Meet by Salley Vickers
Rated: 3.38 of 5 stars · 8 ratingsAt the end of his life, an old man waits in his office for a stranger to arrive. Over the next few weeks, Teiresias will visit again, making his way across the heath to relate the story of his life. As these two men sit together in front of a roaring fire, a remarkable tale unfolds...Categorized as:
ancient-civilization classics 20th-century adult book female-author fiction historical -
![The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras]()
The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
Rated: 3.56 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsLol Stein's comfortable married life is disrupted when she returns to her hometown and recalls how she was abandoned by a former fiance...
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