Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Gullivers Travels
    Unavailable
    Gullivers Travels
    Unavailable
    Gullivers Travels
    Ebook353 pages6 hours

    Gullivers Travels

    By Jonathan Swift

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    All parts of the famous stories about "Gullivers Travels" with illustrations by Arthur Rackham.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBooks on Demand
    Release dateOct 31, 2016
    ISBN9783739203799
    Unavailable
    Gullivers Travels
    Author

    Jonathan Swift

    Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667. Although he spent most of his childhood in Ireland, he considered himself English, and, aged twenty-one, moved to England, where he found employment as secretary to the diplomat Sir William Temple. On Temple's death in 1699, Swift returned to Dublin to pursue a career in the Church. By this time he was also publishing in a variety of genres, and between 1704 and 1729 he produced a string of brilliant satires, of which Gulliver's Travels is the best known. Between 1713 and 1742 he was Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin; he was buried there when he died in 1745.

    Read more from Jonathan Swift

    Related to Gullivers Travels

    Related ebooks

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      John Rousmaniere

      Mar 14, 2017

      John Rousmaniere is a titan of yachting journalism, having written hundreds of articles and several books on sailing and seamanship. He was an onboard reporter for both the 1972 Bermuda Race and the infamous 1979 Fastnet Race, races in which both fle

      4 min read

    • Article

      Bard In The Woods

      Nov 30, 2020

      Bard In The Woods
      4 min read

    • Article

      Paul Heiney

      Feb 24, 2023

      Paul Heiney
      3 min read

    • Article

      I, Spy

      Aug 7, 2018

      Many things happened to me for the first time on a night in April 1944. I rode in a Black Maria; I jumped from a bomber with a tangled parachute; and I began my mission in wartime France as a British secret agent. We drove in the Black Maria from Int

      17 min read

    • Article

      Paul Heiney

      Feb 24, 2023

      Paul Heiney
      3 min read

    • Article

      Paul Heiney

      Feb 24, 2023

      Paul Heiney
      3 min read

    • Article

      Crossing The Bar

      Mar 11, 2021

      The Edwardian period of English yachting is best remembered for the great cutters and schooners of the racing scene. From Cowes to the Clyde professionally crewed yachts competed for big-money prizes while fortunes changed hands by way of wagers on r

      7 min read

    • Article

      A Close Call

      Jan 6, 2022

      A Close Call
      4 min read

    • Article

      First Passage

      Jun 3, 2021

      First Passage
      16 min read

    • Article

      Crazy Times at Sea

      Feb 3, 2017

      A long time ago in an office far, far away, I received a typewritten manuscript that told a harrowing tale of a transatlantic voyage gone horribly wrong. The author and his girlfriend had answered a magazine advertisement for crew (yes, it was that l

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Bit Aground

      Feb 13, 2020

      A Bit Aground
      7 min read

    • Article

      Sailing Alone Is The Safest Choice

      Dec 8, 2023

      Much like land, container ships and icebergs, communication is best avoided at sea, which is why, to avoid the misunderstandings that so often arise from people attempting to communicate with me, I mostly sail alone. And so far, I’ve never hit an ice

      3 min read

    • Article

      NATURAL High

      May 25, 2020

      NATURAL High
      6 min read

    • Article

      Solo Overboard

      Nov 14, 2019

      Solo Overboard
      8 min read

    • Article

      Relentless

      Oct 1, 2019

      Relentless
      6 min read

    • Article

      Tom Cunliffe

      Dec 1, 2023

      Tom Cunliffe
      5 min read

    • Article

      Tom Cunliffe

      Dec 1, 2023

      Tom Cunliffe
      5 min read

    • Article

      Ashore at Dunkirk

      Mar 30, 2023

      Ashore at Dunkirk
      5 min read

    • Article

      My First Airplane flight

      Jan 31, 2023

      My First Airplane flight
      3 min read

    • Article

      My First Airplane flight

      Jan 31, 2023

      My First Airplane flight
      3 min read

    • Article

      Harrac Goes South

      Apr 29, 2022

      Harrac Goes South
      6 min read

    • Article

      Harrac Goes South

      Apr 29, 2022

      Harrac Goes South
      6 min read

    • Article

      One Night

      Sep 15, 2022

      The night looks wrapped in milky cotton. The full moon shines through from time to time when the fogbanks turn wispy under the stratus. The entire sea glows with greenish, phosphorescent sheets. It is hardly rumbling, because the fog muffles all soun

      5 min read

    • Article

      Following The Wake Of History

      Apr 11, 2024

      Following The Wake Of History
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Harbour Affair

      Jul 9, 2018

      A Harbour Affair
      3 min read

    Reviews for Gullivers Travels

    3.5/5

    2,825 ratings84 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Jonathan Swift must have been smoking opium when he wrote this because it is wackadoodle. It is also weird to have a female read the book when the main character is a man. I don't think I would have read the physical book.
    • 2/5
      Far more interesting than I'd hoped, given how old it is. I see both why it has historically been praised, and why I'm glad to say I've read it and now never pick it up again.
    • 3/5
      Got around to read this classic. Book is essentially a collection of author's imaginations on what people will do and act in different strange societies. Author imagines well on social culture and actions based on people but doesn't think through a lot on social and technological environment. All socieities - small people, monsterous people, floating people, horse people - have pretty much that distinction but rest of world - animals, plants, things and inventions - are similar to rest of normal world. Transition from one society to another, through multiple sea voyages, is fast and not dwelt much upon. Lots of people found this work of Swift to be satire on modern world, and it kind of is, but very peripheral one. For instance religion and politicians can be arbitary and foolish and that's mentioned as such without really understanding depth of things. In the end, excitement of new world goes away from readers and long monologues of narrator's experiences and discourse within those society becomes boring. It's readable but forgettable book.
    • 5/5
      Swift's ideas about human nature and government are timeless. Gulliver's Travels is a must read!
    • 3/5
      Summary provided by Amazon.com:Shipwrecked castaway Lemuel Gulliver's encounters with the petty, diminutive Lilliputians, the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the abstracted scientists of Laputa, the philosophical Houyhnhnms, and the brutish Yahoos give him new, bitter insights into human behavior. Swift's fantastic and subversive book remains supremely relevant in our own age of distortion, hypocrisy, and irony.My response:often intrigued with the small stature of the Lilliputians, and who is not intrigued by giants? However, I don’t think we’ve ever made it to the talking horses. One thing that is definite about Swift is that he has a sense of humor and an impressive imagination.I believe that Swift was angry with social ills. Honestly, I would say that most people, then and now are still just as angered by social ills as he was. How can we even compare his novel where he is describing the Yahoos as greedy savages (in a place where they have no advancement of the society he was in), to political books that are currently released and point out directly how our country is failing? Rush Limbaugh, for example, spouts daily on the radio that he doesn’t believe our leader will do any good for a nation. Our society has basically bankrupted itself based off of greed. What is fairly funny is that there are a few rich people that could basically bail out major companies without any help from the government, and yet they are coming to the government to help them out.The Yahoos are described as beings that are obsessed with treasures, fight amongst one another continuously, become lazy unless forced to work, covet each other with no regards to others around them, and are overrun with greed, avarice, lust, etc. It’s impossible not to see the similarities. I just think we conclude that it is human nature.
    • 4/5
      Meesterlijk in zijn passages met kritiek op algemeenmenselijke toestanden. Frisse satire, al is het verhaal van de reus in Lilliputtersland intussen wat afgezaagd, dat wordt ruimschoots gecompenseerd vooral door het laatste verhaal.
    • 5/5
      Remarkable.
    • 3/5
      I was extremely surprised by the story told in this book mainly because of the presupposition that I had because of a very old movie that I had seen. Yes, there were the little people and the giants but then the story goes on to further travels. The "adventures" show mankind in a very poor way with the satirical exposures of bad governments and prejudices that we would find nonsensical today. However, I wonder if 300 years from now if mankind would feel the same about our prejudices.Maybe we can still learn from the past.
    • 4/5
      The last book of the four, about the utopian society of the horses I liked the best by far. In the first two the author is obsessed with the sizes of all things, these being extremely small (Lilliput) or extremely large (land of the giants). The third book is a bit chaotic with all the different countries visited by Gulliver. The last book is a real and complete satirical story with a melancholy undertone.
    • 3/5
      Written nearly 300 years ago, at it's time it must have been a groundbreaking satire. To be fair it is still current in many ways especially regarding the justiciary, the establishment and western mankind in general. However, I found it very dull to read. He goes away, has an adventure and comes back. He does this four times. Heaven knows he wasn't much of a family man and we don't hear much of what his wife thought of it all. I found it quite boring and this was heading for two stars until the final episode with the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos. The former representing a superior being which mankind may believe he is and the latter being a mirror to how Swift believes they really are. This part was both insightful and humorous and rescued this book for me.
    • 3/5
      A local librarian told me this wasn't like reading a modern fictional novel. I know older books can be difficult, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be and was quite funny in parts!
    • 4/5
      In the second half of the 17th century, Robert Hooke and Antony von Leeuwenhoek refined and used the microscope to view, for the first time, the microbiotic world around them. In a generation, people's conception of large and small shifted. "It is no exaggeration," says Henri Hitchins, "to say that without the development of microscopy Swift's book would not have been written" (376).Most of us know that Swift wrote a tale about a seafarer named Gulliver who washed up on a beach in Lilliput only to be pinned to the ground by little people. Some know that Gulliver's next voyage was to Brobdingnag where he encountered people as large from his perspective as he was to the Lilliputans. This is only half the book.In the second half he traveled to the floating island of Laputa where he met people who are so enraptured by philosophy and abstractions that they hire a "flappers" to attend to them on walks. The sole purpose of the flapper is to "gently to strike with his bladder the mouth of him who is to speak, and the right ear of him or them to whom the speaker addresses himself" (192). You could say the Laputans are so heavenly minded they're no earthly good.The final journey puts Gulliver in the land of the Houyhnhnms, a place where proto-humans have degenerated into disgusting "Yahoos" who are disdained by utterly rational (and virtually passionless) horses.If the microscope inspired the shift in optical perspective in Gulliver's first two journeys, it is a metaphor used to peer into the core of human nature during the second two trips. On the last journey, Gulliver's conversation with the Houyhnhnms reveal the depth of humanity's depravity—bordering on horror. He describes the reality of life in England in a richly ironic way that exposes dark truths about his society. Take his description of lawyers, for example:"I said there was a society of men among us bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose that white is black and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves" (304).While it's easy to spot the sarcasm in Swift's voice, I can't help but think that a better understanding of the history of 18th century England would help me to catch more of the specific references. Still, Gulliver's Travels, despite having been written three centuries ago, was quite a page-turner. This is no mere children's book!
    • 5/5
      For good reason, this is a must read classic. The book appeals on a superficial level with the author's exotic travels, and yet has a far deeper message about human nature and the society of the day.Prior reviewers (and Wikipedia) summarize its contents, so I will not do so again. However, my favorite section of the book is contained with chapter 4 regarding the land of Houyhnhnms (horses) and Yahoos (uncivilized humans). The author's sometimes graphic depiction of his homeland's princes, lawyers, doctors and military leaders is absolutely hilarious and thought provoking.
    • 4/5
      This nearly 300 year old classic deserves its reputation, but it is a novel of two halves. The first two books of the four, in which Gulliver visits respectively Lilliput (very small people) and Brobdingnag (giants) are very good, funny, adventurous, imaginative and bawdy and would be worth 5/5 by themselves. However, I found the latter two books when he visits the flying island of Laputa and other lands; then in the final book, the land of the Houyhnhnms (intelligent horses subjugating primates who resemble degraded humans) duller and a lot harder to get through. They contain a lot of quite clever satire on the human condition and on civic life in Europe, but are rather overegged and over long, with little plot so rather a slog. 2/5 for the latter half, so overall 3.5/5.
    • 3/5
      Most people have seen a cinematic version of this book, right? Most already know the story without actually bothering with reading the book? The book was written nearly 300 years old so some of the little of the language will be a little archaic but it's only a kids book so will be an easy read. Given the age of the story it will have very little relevance with events of today.Well at least that is what I thought beforehand. How very wrong I was!For those of you who do not know the story Gulliver basically visits four islands, one populated by a lot of little people, the next by some giants, then moving on to a flying island before finally landing on one ruled by horses where humens are the savages, something akin to the films Planet of the Apes but with horses rather than chimpanzees. Firstly the title is something of a misnomer. Rather than describing happenings in far off fanciful lands Swift is really only interested in taking a satirical swipe at events and in particular the politics an awful lot closer to home,namely London. Swift's family was originally from England but had backed the losing side in the English Civil War whereupon having lost their lands there were forced to take up residence Ireland. Swift was born and educated in Dublin but moved from his birthplace to London as a young man and there he became very active in the politics of the day,firstly as a Whig sympathiser then as a Tory. However, when the hoped for preferments failed to materialize Swift was virtually exiled back to Ireland making him rather bitter towards the political elite back in London.Some of the satire is fairly obvious, liking peeing on the palace in Lilliput to extinguish a fire there (in fact bodily functions seem to play a large part of the first two sections) but some other referances were I admit quite lost on me. Rather than travel broadening the mind it seemed to make Gulliver's more inward looking, so much so in the end he cannot bear the sight or touch of fellow humans, and this is probably where the book lost me as a fan. Personally I found the part on Laputa rather dull and very long-winded which was followed by the stay with the Houyhnhms which felt merely like the ramblings of a very bitter and disappointed in life man.On the whole I found the book interesting but ultimately a little disappointing and I certainy enjoyed Lilliput the most.
    • 4/5
      This is a fantastical satire that uses the ancient method of a journey (in this case multiple journeys) to foreign lands in the service of social satire and cultural commentary. The motivating force behind Gulliver's Travels is the author's apparent disgust with human folly and pretension; the ideas are embodied in grotesques and fantastic creatures, in the six-inch high Lilliputians, the gigantic Brobdingnagians, the horse-like Houyhnhnms and the disgusting Yahoos. These characters are so memorable that their names have become part of our culture. The journeys provide lessons for Lemuel Gulliver who is an honest if gullible narrator. Whether he learned the right lessons or ones that have value for others is for each reader to decided. However, concluding, he confesses that he could be reconciled to the English Yahoos "if they would be content with those Vices and Follies only which Nature hath entitled them to. I am not in the least provoked at the sight of a Lawyer, a Pick-pocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamster, a Politician, a Whoremunger, a Physician, . . . or the like: This is all according to the due Course of Things: but, when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride, it immediately breaks all the Measures of my patience."
    • 4/5
      Pretty good stuff. Book 3 isn't as great, and book 4 gets a little preachy at times, but fun to read. Makes me wonder about Yahoo's decision to name themselves after it; Yahoos represent a pretty cynical, misanthropic view of humanity.
    • 4/5
      Written about 300 years ago this story has aged very well and Gulliver's adventures are event today very entertaining. Gulliver's Travels was meant to mock the hordes of books about adventurous travels released at the time which often exaggerated the dangers faced and the belitteled the intellect of the natives encountered. And so Gulliver meets giants, tiny people, horses which rule over men and people living on a floating island. In addition to the entertainment value these episodes hold it is also very interesting to see how critical Jonathan Swift was of English society and values. This criticism is never voiced by the main character directly, but surface through the discussions Gulliver has with the people he meets.The Audiobook version published by Alcazar AudioWorks features a terrific Narrator which makes the story a joy to listen to.
    • 5/5
      Swift's ideas about human nature and government are timeless. Gulliver's Travels is a must read!
    • 3/5
      A fictional novel about a man called Gulliver that gives up on his profession as a surgeon and travels the seas. Among his adventure Gulliver runs into some trouble as well as stumbling upon many shocking lands. Gulliver comes across tiny people, giants, naive scientists, and some talking horses. A fairly funny and entertaining read that is a good story and worth reading.
    • 4/5
      Apparently, one must know their history very well to understand satire. This was an entertaining work -- creative, subtle, and poignant, though slow in parts (somewhat due to the length of time required to "read" the proper nouns properly). The horse kingdom was my favorite of the four, due to what it said about the advantages and disadvantages of a society based purely on reason.
    • 5/5
      The writing is beautiful, the riffs on law, politics and general intellectual attitudes are hilarious, and the structure was great. The third part's a bit tough to get in to, but otherwise, first class. Easy to read, too.
    • 4/5
      I put of reading this book for so long, I had begun to believe I had actually read it! It is quite biting in it's satire and very funny, but there are parts where it gets tedious.
    • 5/5
      I must say that this is the first book that I KNOW I'm going to re-read at the turn of the year. I love social satire and this was right up my alley...although the critique of the human condition was very sad indeed. Especially when noticing that things haven't changed as much as they should have with concern to human behavior over the millenia. The story was humorous, informative, entertaining and philosophical all at once, and at all times. It was also much more vile and nasty than any of the childrens cartoons or movies based on the story we may have seen while growing up. The themes of social strength, human ego, the limits of human understanding, and the individual versus society were explored at length and at every angle possible (almost). A great read; but make sure you read the un-edited, unabridged version....that's the way Swift wanted it. You won't be able to look at the world, or your own beliefs through the same lens again.
    • 4/5
      Sure,the story of the big man washed up on the shore surrounded by little people is a cute story we've all seen Mickey Mouse do. But reading this book as an adult was an eye-opener. Swift's tongue is firmly planted in his cheek through the whole book and this is a great one to read aloud.
    • 4/5
      When this book was first written, it became famous for its biting satire and disdain for 'modern' politics and politicians. In the near-300 years that have passed since then, the satirical edges have softened, leaving a great adventure story.
    • 3/5
      That was interesting. Just finished. I would say it was written for someone at with a middle school level of reading. Fun easy read. I think I was missing some important info regarding the countries being made fun of to really 'get it'. Swift enjoyed a little too much, the making up of strange names and words to emphasize the differences in the other lands and cultures the charactor 'visited'. One of the points that could be taken from it, are peoples problems and worries are all relative to their perspective.
    • 2/5
      Not really a review as such. I gave up in reading this book after 80 pages as i simply couldn't get into it. Yes i can see how it was a satire on politics at that time, but quite simpy it bored me.
    • 5/5
      satire on the political word atthe time can be applyed today
    • 4/5
      This book is one of the best examples of satire. Swift takes on a trip around the world to show us the problems right at home. Though some have criticized the end of the book, I found it to be the best part. We see the human race totally flipped upside down and it was the most eye-opening section of the book. I picked the book up because I thought it would be about an adventure, but it is so much more than that.