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Summary: A spoon fed course in philosophy
Review: You have to sit up to read Sophie's World. It needs your full attention, but it is a spoon fed course in philosophy and world history taught by a fine teacher with a great imagination! I read it twice
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Summary: Lame prose. Calvino et al FAR better.High school phil course
Review: Not a great novel, by any means! Good for a freshman (or even high school) philosophy course, but that's about all. Prose was lame, I thought (to be fair, it may be better in the original language). Plot twists and meta-fictional devices were nothing new. This sort of thing has been done much better by people like Italo Calvino, and many others (I don't remember very clearly who -- which is partly because I think there are so many. Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.) PLEASE: save yourself a long boring read and skip this one
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Summary: This book has found its way into my life and my heart.
Review: Well organized book on history of philosophy. The history part "sneaks up on you." Novel and history all in one book! Easy to read and hard to put down! The author states that "the only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder," and the book helps us tap that faculty. I'm going to read it more than once
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Summary: Love to think? Enter Sophie's World
Review: What a joy. Ever person that love's a good book, Loves to think about ideas should read this book. Read it and give it to a friend. If you know a teenager give them Sophie's Worl
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Summary: Climb out from the fur of the white rabbit!
Review: As adults we forget to keep asking the philosophical questions that were so stimulating in our early adulthoods. This book reminds us of all those questions: Is there a God? What is the meaning of life? What is human knowledge and where does it come from? It is very exciting to stretch your mind again over the theoretical. This book is the tool to help you do so. Before you become entrenched in the mundanity of life's day to day problems again, enter Sophie's World
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Summary: Skip the story-Read the history
Review: I have always desired an overview of the various philosophical figures and eras, and this novel handled that exquisitely. I breezed through the descriptions of Sartre and Kierkegaard, but the characters and general plot were just too painfully shallow. My copy of Sophie's World is dog-eared and highlighted, and I find myself referring to it quite often...I just wonder if this book would have been more interesting if Gaarder had created it as a non-fiction work
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Summary: One of the best books I've read in 50 years
Review: Although I became bogged down in the book about the time of Freud, it is one of the absolutely best books ever written. What a wonderful vehicle for teaching philosophy! It is spellbinding. The reader immediately sees the ways in which philosophical argument can be made.
My taste in books has run from Gone With the Wind to "trashy" mysteries to poetry. The poetry runs from Robert W. Service to Tennyson to Chaucer. Sophie's World is still a unique book--interesting and well-writte
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Summary: No literary masterpiece, but a handy survey of philosophy.
Review: This book is an excellent buy if the reader is interested in a relatively superficial overview of the history of philosophy. Gaarder's explanations are not always entirely clear--perhaps that is only because of the nebulous subjects discussed in the book--and it is somewhat difficult to keep track of all of the philosophers when Gaarder refers back to them. Gaarder is a teacher of philosophy, not literature, and this is apparent in his shallow, obvious attempts to give depth to his characters and make the book seem like less of a textbook and more of a novel. However, the story is interestingly woven, a fantastic and surreal web of metaphysics, and Sophie's various encounters with her philosophy teacher and other unpredictable occurrences make the plot fascinating. From a literary standpoint, this story is a flop, very shabbily developed, but for the casual philosophical dilettante, "Sophie's World" is a fun and easy way to survey the ideas that have shaped past eras
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Summary: Wrapped in a Riddle
Review: Part novel, part philosophy primer and all riddle, this book should be read at least twice. Read it once for the story, read it again for the philosophical discourse. Whether you're 13, 33 or 93, this book will make you go "hmm."
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Summary: The most creative book I've ever read!!!
Review: This book was assigned to me in my survey class of Philosophy this semester. WHAT A GREAT SUPRISE!!! This may be the best book ever written, and it's at the very least, the best book I've ever read! Not only will you get a wonderful tour of the history of philosophy, but it's all mixed into a brilliantly developed story line featuring a 15 year old girl. I love this book so much that I am going to buy several copies and send them out to family and friends for Christmas. So if you're thinking, "what do you get someone who already has everything", then I have the answer. SOPHIE'S WORLD!!!
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