civilization and history by C.E.M joad
Answers
Explanation:
CEM Joad’s The Story of Civilization is one of the best examples of the cliche that awesome things come in small packages. All of 94 pages in big font, it packs in some profound philosophy in palatable, often delicious, lines. I read it as a child when my guru, my English teacher, lent it to me (he used to say I bought this book only for two rupees from a roadside book vendor). The book and its take on what it means to be ‘civilized’ have stayed with me ever since. If you want to introduce a child or a young mind to philosophy and good ideas, this is the go-to book. In fact the book’s intended primary audience, when it was first published, was kids.
The Story of Civilization was written in 1931. Author Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad was one of Britain’s most colorful and controversial intellectual figures of the 1940s. It is very difficult to find this book or references to it these days: I was surprised to see that even goodreads‘s page on CEM Joad does not mention it. The oblivion that the book currently is in prompted me to write this post. While a lot of what Joad wrote is out-dated information, the beauty of some of his ideas is eternal.
Joad begins his discourse on civilization with a chapter titled ‘A Talk’, in which he describes a wonderful conversation with Lucy (probably his daughter). Below are screenshots of the first two pages of the book.
The remaining post contains select lines and passages from the book, chapterwise. (I have italicized my personal favorites. I urge readers to remember, at all times, that all of this was written some 90 years back.)