[.ca] Great Ideas Why I Write (ISBN 014101900X)

A miracle of low-cost publication and high-impact philosophy:
First of all, a note on the series. The Penguin Books *Great Ideas* series is, indeed, itself a great idea. Touching upon, in one way or another, the literature of Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval and Renaissance Europe, the Enlightenment and the tortured Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, each volume is a little miracle of low-cost publication and high-impact philosophy. Many of the entries are highly abridged, however, and would each of them repay many times over a complete reading. This collection of four of George Orwell's essays (*Why I Write*, *The Lion and the Unicorn*, *A Hanging* and *Politics and the English Language*, all published under the title of the first) escapes this last criticism, as each of the essays is included in its entirety. A more famous, but not more representative or better, collection might have been selected. (For a more complete and, what is certainly more to the point, completely free parcel of Orwell's essays, novels, articles and poems, head over to www.orwell.ru. Each entry is available in English and Russian. Nothing like reading *Animal Farm* in Russian. :o) The reasoning behind the choice of *A Hanging*, his very first essay, over the better known *Shooting an Elephant* is relatively clear, given space limitations and the need to express Orwell's anti-Imperialist sentiments gleaned during his time in Burma. The inclusion of *The Lion and the Unicorn* also needs no defence, in that it contains an excellent cross-section of Orwell's positive policies for the future and his take on 'Englishness' as a phenomenon. That it also boasts perhaps the greatest and most evocative opening sentence of all time doesn't hurt either. *Why I Write* is one of the best writer's manifestos I have ever come across, and contains quite a bit of Orwell's dry wit: "All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery." *Politics and the English Language* shows Orwell to be a forerunner of the modish Lynn Truss movement against rogue apostrophes, but in a far more serious sense. I keep his six rules for better writing, and his truly funny (and frightening) translation of a passage of Ecclesiastes out of the King James version into modern jargon taped firmly to my door for my students to see. All in all, it has to be said that reading even this little bit of Orwell will be a profound experience for anyone who hasn't. If the Great Books series can get us all interested in the big ideas again, even in this bite-sized format, then we will all be better off.