- Paperback: 208 pages
- Publisher: Yale University Press (2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0300084293
- ISBN-13: 978-0300084290
- Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 13.1 x 1.4 cm
- Shipping Weight: 222 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,155,053 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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4.0 out of 5 stars (23 customer reviews)
75 of 75 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
This book is where the term 'Utopia' comes from, Sep 7 2010
By Jeffrey Van Wagoner - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This book has been on my reading list for a while, and I finally grabbed a copy to read when I got my Kindle. Thomas More, as well as many other famous men, put to writing a vision of the ideal society. As with most visions of the ideal society, he had some good ideas that were eventually put in place, but he also had many impractical ideas that won't work just due to the nature of man. It was also interesting to see that he came from an era that accepted several social mores such as slavery that today we find unacceptable and were deemed good institutions in his ideal society.I think my favorite part was the method the Utopians used to minimize the importance of gold, fine apparel, and money. Gold and jewelry were considered baubles only interesting to children. They marked their slaves by bedecking them with gold. He related a story of a foreign ambassador coming to visit the Utopians. They mistook the gold bedecked ambassador as the slave and the plainly clothed slave as the ambassador and treated each as such.
I highly recommend this relatively short book as a glance into how people in the Middle Ages viewed the ideal society and also as a legitimate look at ongoing social problems. More highlights pride as one of the biggest problems facing society. It appears to be a continuing issue.
31 of 35 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Utopia is acclaimed all by itself, Feb 16 2010
By Jessss "Euchella" - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
The work begins with written correspondence between Thomas More and several people he had met on the continent: Peter Giles, town clerk of Antwerp, and Jerome Busleiden, counselor to Charles V. More chose these letters, which are communications between actual people, to further the plausibility of his fictional land. In the same spirit, these letters also include a specimen of the Utopian alphabet and its poetry. It is a great book that allows one to think about human nature. Utopia itself is an imaginary place that is nonexistent. Many have wondered over the years why More even wrote it. I forces one to consider that if the government of a place allows circumstances to occur that remove mans ability to take care of basic needs on a just and right way, should they be punished when they achieve it by breaking their laws?
31 of 35 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Comparing editions, Sep 19 2004
By Thad Curtz - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Utopia (Paperback)
The Yale edition (Miller's translation - $6.95) gives a bare list of events in More's life, but the short introduction mostly focuses on the syntax and rhetoric of the book; there's very little in it about the social and historical background. It omits the commendatory letters from various humanists, but includes both the opening letter to Giles from More, and the postscript letter to Giles from the 1517 edition (but not the Busleyden letter about Utopia as a real place that prompted it). (It also has the 1518 woodcut map of Utopia.) The sidenotes that Miller thinks are not mere section markers are placed in the footnotes.The Hackett edition (Wooton's translation - also $6.95) has a pointed persuasively argued introduction focusing on the translator's own interpretation of the work; he relates it to More's life and the paradoxical double vision of Christian piety and ordinary social life also found in More's friend Erasmus's "The Sileni of Alicbiades," which is included. This edition puts the sidenotes in the margins, and also includes all the introductory and appended material by others, the 1516 map, the Utopian alphabet and the garden woodcut, and black and white illustrations of portraits of More, Erasmus and Gilles.
I haven't seen the other options.
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