World Civ Suggested Reading List
This is a suggested list. Some of these books cover topics from semester 2. Remember, you must bring a book that covers a topic for this semester so be aware of that. I’ll add more when I see fit.
Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, Darfur: A Short History of a Long War.
Eugene Rogan and Avi Shlaim, The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948.
Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev.
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
Collapse
Ruoxi Chen, Execution of Mayor Yin
Yu Hua, To Live
Chronicles of a Blood Merchant
Donald Niewyk, The Holocaust
Gerda Weisman Klein, All But My Life
Richard Schiff, Holocaust Poetry
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Mary Ellen Snodgrass, World Epidemics: from Prehistory to Sars
Jack Weatherford, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World
Jean Bottero, Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia
Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography
The Egyptian’s Book of the Dead (variety of editors and publishers)
Epic of Gilgamesh (variety of editors, translations and publishers)
Seamus Heaney, Beowulf
Yu Hua, To Live
Chronicles of a Blood Merchant
Lisa See, Snowflower and the Secret Fan
Lady Murasaki, Tale of Genji
Marvin Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook of Sacred Texts
Lao Tzu (or Laozi), Dao De Jing (or Tao Te Ching)
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Karen Armstrong, Muhammed: A Biography of the Prophet
Benjamin Ajak, Benson Deng, Alephonsian Deng, and Judy Bernstein, They Poured Fire on Us: 3 Lost Boys from Sudan
Ishmeal Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
Aristotle, Politics
Herodotus, The Histories
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Virgil, The Aeneid
Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian
Barbara Metcalf, A History of Modern India
The Dhammapada (various translations, editors, publishers)
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Cantebury Tales
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns
The Kite Runner
