Download or read book The World in Thirty-Eight Chapters Or Dr Johnson's Guide to Life written by Henry Hitchings and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Samuel Johnson was a critic, an essayist, a poet and a biographer. He was also, famously, the compiler of the first good English dictionary, published in 1755. He was, and remians, a perceptive commentator on the vanity of human wishes, the need to cultivate kindness, the complexities of family life (especially marriage), the effects of boredom and the fleeting nature of pleasure. He writes incisively and humanely about ambition, hypocrisy, fallibility and disorders of the mind, and of the corrosive effects of obsession and the precariousness of fame. He is a source of profound good sense about what it means to teach, read, write and travel. More than that, though, he continually translates his experience of poverty, scorn, pain and madness into a rich understanding of how to be."--Back cover