Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
Swift's mean, necessary joke about rulers.
For you if
you want proof that political satire has always been this mean and this necessary.
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$12 MSRP · Paperback
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
A ship's surgeon washes up among tiny politicians who go to war over which end of an egg to crack, and by the fourth voyage he would rather live with horses than humans. Swift packed Gulliver with every grift of Georgian power: party politics, colonial grabs, scientific vanity, religion as a weapon. It still isn't out of date. The children's version you may have read cut exactly the part that bites.
Where This Book Lives
The first publisher expurgated the 1726 text over Swift's objections, and sanitized editions have been defanging it ever since, so get an unabridged edition. Book IV's contempt for humankind is bleak; Swift was not a comfortable person and this is not a comfortable read. Sits next to A Modest Proposal. Expurgated, not formally banned, so isBanned stays false.
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb(1964)
dir. Stanley Kubrick
Same themes: Political Satire, Satire and Power
Laughing so you don't scream, since 1964.
A rogue Air Force general triggers an unrecallable nuclear strike on the USSR, and the War Room scrambles — bureaucratically, absurdly — to stop the end of the world.
Why it’s here: The original 'laugh so you don't scream' text — mutually assured destruction played entirely for farce, and the farce is the argument: absurdity is what nuclear brinkmanship actually looks like from the inside.
Where to watch: Rent on Apple TV, AmazonLetterboxd ↗
The Death of Stalin(2017)
dir. Armando Iannucci
Same themes: Political Satire, Satire and Power
Succession played as the farce it basically was.
Soviet officials scramble for power in the chaotic days after Stalin's death, played as farce that never loses sight of how many people the farce actually killed.
Why it’s here: Turns the actual, undignified scramble after Stalin's death into slapstick without softening what any of it cost — the comedy is the argument that authoritarian succession is always this undignified, not an exception made for laughs.
Where to watch: Free on TubiLetterboxd ↗
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
A Small Place
Jamaica Kincaid
The tourist brochure, answered.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
Cedric J. Robinson
Capitalism was racial from day one.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Capitalism and Slavery
Eric Williams
Slavery didn't fund empire. Slavery WAS empire.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Mike Davis
Famine as imperial policy.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Doughnut Economics
Kate Raworth
The economy we need, drawn as a doughnut.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Hidden Persuaders
Vance Packard
Your desires were engineered. You just lived them.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
C Street
Jeff Sharlet
When Bible study runs the government.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Family
Jeff Sharlet
Power, prayer, and political puppeteers.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST