📚carl sagan's 1954 reading list

his handwritten semester reading list from 1954 at the University of Chicago, now sitting in the Library of Congress. ten titles, in order.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds - Charles Mackay

the crowd psychology one, still gets cited in every bubble-market article a century later

The Uses of the Past: Profiles of Former Societies - Herbert J. Muller

The Immoralist - André Gide

short novel, one sitting if you don't stop to think about the plot too hard

Education for Freedom - Robert M. Hutchins

Young Archimedes and Other Stories - Aldous Huxley

Huxley put real physics into a short story about a kid genius in Italy, nobody assigns this one and probably should, worth the math

Timaeus - Plato

public domain, free, all of it, any translation works for this one

Who Speaks for Man? - Norman Cousins

Cousins editing a whole book asking what humanity is for, right after Hiroshima was still recent history

The Republic - Plato

A History of Western Philosophy - W. T. Jones

a textbook basically, this is the one you skim not read cover to cover

But We Were Born Free - Elmer Davis

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