I bought this book used from a library, along with a dozen others, a decade ago without much thought of what I was buying. Wow! I ended up with a lifetime of excellent reading. I've since had this book at my bedside, off and on, for the last ten years. So much excellent information is packed into this book that you can keep coming back to it and learning the most important writings of civilization.

This book summarizes the works for you. With just a little reading you can say something like, "What Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity did was radically change our perspective of time and space, and matter and energy. He showed that all motion is relative, and that the velocity of light is independent of the motion of its source. The implications are profound. To illustrate..."

Or, "What Socrates means by his definition of love, as written in Plato's Symposium, is that love is the pursuit of the beautiful; a desire for the immortal though reproduction. This, at its highest state, is manifested in a generalized love of universal beauty - beautiful souls, thoughts, laws, institutions and the immortal afterlife."

Everyone needs to read these works, and here is a condensed way to do it. It's a small investment in your education.

I recently had the pleasure of taking a class at Missouri Southern State College in Joplin, MO that used the Downs book as a textbook for the class! At that time, I had not read, nor even heard of many of the works Downs discussed. However, after reading his insightful summaries on these classics of political, social and economic history, I felt I owed it to myself to pick up the full length versions and devour them!

I have been reading an average of 2 books a month. Yet I throw most of them away after reading. This is one of a few books I keep in my library. And it is the third time I bought it because every time someone borrow the book, I never got it back. Books That Changed The World summarizes the influences of the great books to the way we believe in things, some of which we take it for granted now. Things like the solar system, gravitational force. I hardly give a five-star to any book reviews, but this one well deserves it.