Rating: 
Summary: Maybe not a "Classic"
Review: Gulliver's Travels was all in all not a bad book. It was good entertainment at the beginning, but after Part I and II it got old. It read slow and it seemed as if the author was just trying to use up the pages. I would recommend you read it, but not as a first choice.
Rating: 
Summary: Swift was an 18th century Unabomber
Review: This book is definitely not the fuzzy, adorable story of big people, little people, and talking horses that currently rests in the popular perception. Sure, it has some interesting scenes and sharp satire. But the Houyhnhnm section of the book (roughly the last fourth) is an unending, unrelenting, anti-human, anti-technology diatribe worthy of Hobbes, Rosseau or Nietzsche. Swift's philosophy apparently is that we should all know our place in the world and never try to improve it; we should live close to the land and shun technology; we should live in simple huts and contemplate good, pure thoughts while communing with nature. If Swift were alive today he'd be living in Montana, sending mailbombs to college professors. Swift's manner of exposition on human shortcomings is also particularly blunt, cheap, and crude. It's a formula repeated by many authors: first, create mythological creatures (talking horses in this case). Second, bestow them with superhuman qualities. Third, compare human beings to the creatures. Fourth, rant on and on about how humans come up short. The technique is boring, unsatisfying, underhanded, unilluminating, unrealistic, unhelpful, and obnoxious. So if you do decide to read this book, my recommendation is to read the first two voyages only, and leave the rest in your bathroom in case you run out of toilet paper.
Rating: 
Summary: Surprisingly heavyhanded and bawdy--but still excellent
Review: I must agree with the previous reviewer that I found Swift's satire to be very heavyhanded at times (e.g., a codeword for "the Administration" is "a running sore"; a professor's cure for colic is to ram bellows up the patient's butt). I suppose that this is because some of the topical and local humor is lost on readers, who, reading 300 years later, do not always understand some of the subtler jabs and double meanings. I also found the book to be surprisingly risqué (e.g., a 16-year-old giant using Captain Gulliver as her sex toy), not exactly the image the book has in the current public perception. But that does not diminish the book in any way; it is still an outstanding adventure that can be read on at least two levels, and can be enjoyed by all. In this respect it is similar to the Chronicles of Narnia.
Rating:
Summary: Satiric travels into several remote nations of the world.
Review: As a result of an astounding run of bad luck, Lemuel Gulliver, first a ship's surgeon and later a ship's captain, is washed ashore in one strange place after another. First he meets the Lilliputians, tiny people about six inches tall. Next he visits the Brobdingnaggians, giants as large compared to Gulliver as he was to the Lilliputians. His third voyage takes him to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan. His last voyage is to the country of the Houyhnhnms. On his first three voyages, he sees the foibles and pettiness of humanity by observing the strange humans he meets. But he observes them from his own human perspective. In the country of the Houyhnhnms, he meets the degenerate and repulsive human-like Yahoos and the almost perfect horse-like Houyhnhnms. Viewing humanity (as represented by the Yahoos) from the Houyhnhnm perspective so sickens Gulliver that upon his return to England, he is loathe to associate himself with his fellow humans and requires a lenghty period of adjustment before he can look at himself in the mirror or even eat with his wife and children. Gulliver's Travels is satire. Almost nothing in 18th century England is safe from attack by Swift's pen. Although much of the book is dated, the same sort of humans that Swift wrote about are still around today.
Rating: 
Summary: good authorative edition with informative notes
Review: I like that this edition preserves the original 18th Century spelling, punctuation and grammar. Too many editions modernize or Americanize the text. The notes at the back are helpful but not intrusive. And it has an overall feel of quality, even though a paperback. I own upwards of 30 editions of Gulliver and this is the one I refer to most often when I need to check a citation or another point of information. I also recommend it immediately to anyone asking for an informative edition. It helps that it is inexpensive and in-print, but it would be my recommendation even if it was harder to come by.
Rating:
Summary: Swift's sattire can be considered cynical:
Review: Although Swift's novel is often read by children, its rough handling of social topics has gained him a reputation for cynicism. In some circles, the book is considered to represent the frustrations of a twisted misanthrope. However, The way Swift paints his angry sattire into a child's fantasy shows his dexterity as a writer. This amusing little fairytale is not to be taken lightly.
Rating: 
Summary: A decent adaptation of Part I of "Gulliver's Travels"
Review: This isn't Jonathan Swift; I just wrote the introductory essay to this edition. The Classics Illustrated version of "Gulliver's Travels" only dramatizes Gulliver's First Voyage -- the Voyage to Lilliput, his most famous. And it doesn't include every scene, either -- the notorious chapter in which Gulliver puts out the burning palace by pissing on it was unaccountably skipped. But it's an okay adaptation, and the essay (ahem) does its best to describe Swift's life, times, the impact of the novel, and offer a synopsis of Parts II-IV.
Rating:
Summary: My favorite all-time classic
Review: In addition to being a marvelous fantasy, this book has much to say about government and human beings.
Rating:
Summary: Are you kidding me?
Review: Who ever said this book was not just for kids is crazy. This book isn't for kids period. It was too long, too confusing, and too boring.It was enough that he traveled to a place with tiny people and another one with giant, but the land with the talking horses was too much. Like someone is going to learn a language(spoken by horses) in less than a year,or at all. This book was Awful!
Rating:
Summary: Not just for kids!
Review: It's amazing how our perspective changes as we age. What we thought was important as children may now seem completely insignificant, replaced by entirely new priorities, priorities children wouldn't even understand. At the same time, things we used to take for granted, like having dinner on the table, being taken care of when we're ill, or getting toys fixed when they are broken, have become items on adult worry lists.
Your perspective on literature can change, too. Reading a story for a second time can give you a completely different view of it. "Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain, which I enjoyed as a sort of an adventure story when I was a kid, now reads as a harsh criticism of society in general and the institution of slavery in particular.
The same thing is true of "Gulliver's Travels" by Jonathan Swift. The first thing I realized upon opening the cover of this book as a college student was that I probably had never really read it before. I knew the basic plot of Lemuel Gulliver's first two voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, home of the tiny and giant people, respectively, but he had two other voyages of which I was not even aware: to a land of philosophers who are so lost in thought they can't see the simplest practical details, Laputa, and to a land ruled by wise and gentle horses or Houyhnhnms and peopled by wild, beastly human-like creatures called Yahoos.
While this book has become famous and even beloved by children, Jonathan Swift was certainly not trying to write a children's book. Swift was well known for his sharp, biting wit, and his bitter criticism of 18th century England and all her ills. This is the man who, to point out how ridiculous English prejudices had become, wrote "A Modest Proposal" which suggested that the Irish raise their children as cattle, to be eaten as meat, and thereby solve the problems of poverty and starvation faced in that country. As horrible as that proposal is, it was only an extension of the kinds of solutions being proposed at the time.
So, although "Gulliver's Travels" is entertaining, entertainment was not Swift's primary purpose. Swift used this tale of a guillable traveler exploring strange lands to point out some of the inane and ridiculous elements of his own society. For example, in describing the government of Lilliput, Swift explains that officials are selected based on how well they can play two games, Rope-Dancing and Leaping and Creeping. These two games required great skill in balance, entertained the watching public, and placed the politicians in rather ridiculous positions, perhaps not so differently from elections of leaders in the 18th century and even in modern times.
Give this book a look again, or for the first time. Even in cases in which the exact object of Swift's satire has been forgotten, his sweeping social commentary still rings true. Sometimes it really does seem that we are all a bunch of Yahoos.
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