Audiobook · read by volunteers
What's Wrong With the World
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)
Read by LibertusMaximus, Jordan, dlorimer, pattymarie, Jeannie, Zloot, Craig Campbell, Houldsworth1, davevoelker, NickNumber · 48 chapters · 7 h 04
About the book
In 1908 a newspaper asked a number of writers what was wrong with the world, and G. K. Chesterton is said to have replied with a single short line naming himself. Two years later he gave the question a fuller answer in this book of essays. Here he turns to the home, the family, property, education, the position of women and the habits of modern politicians, and he looks at each with his usual delight in paradox. He distrusts the experts who propose to cure society and asks what the cure is meant to preserve. Expect sharp jokes, sudden reversals and arguments that are meant to provoke as well as persuade. Many of the opinions will divide listeners, and that is part of the fun. Forty-eight parts, read by ten LibriVox volunteers, make up about seven hours of lively, combative and often very funny debate.
Introduction
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who lived from 1874 to 1936, was one of the most prolific English writers of his age. He produced journalism, essays, poetry, fiction, biography and Christian apologetics, and he was often called the prince of paradox for his habit of making a point by turning a familiar saying inside out. He also created the priest-detective Father Brown, and this book followed Heretics (1905) and Orthodoxy (1908), his best-known books of argument.
What’s Wrong With the World appeared in 1910. Its title echoes a question once put to a group of authors by a newspaper, to which Chesterton’s own answer was famously brief. In this collection of essays he supplies the long version. The chapters range from the failings of modern medicine and politics to the nature of the family, the role of women, property, education and thrift, and they are held together by his conviction that reformers too rarely ask what is worth keeping.
The book belongs to the tradition of the polemical essay, where wit does as much work as argument. Readers have admired it for its energy and criticised it for its prejudices, and a modern audience will find plenty to agree and disagree with.
This recording has forty-eight parts, from the dedication to the final chapters, shared among ten LibriVox volunteers, and lasts roughly seven hours. It is worth hearing today for its style alone, and for the reminder that arguments about home, work and public life are older than we like to think. Whether or not you share his conclusions, he makes you defend your own.
Public domain
G. K. Chesterton died in 1936: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text