Sophie’s World (Book Review)

In order to emphasize the importance of this book, I would suggest the following exercise:

Imagine yourself to be in a world defined by the following …

SCENARIO:  The present world as it is, has been destroyed completely, we are back to the cavemen era.

One day a caveman while digging a hole for himself in the ground comes across a book. He begins to read it (somehow he knows basic English language)

TWENTY YEARS LATER: The world is back to the present era full of inventions and ideas. The holy book believed and followed by all: Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder and the caveman is now the Pope.

That is the power that this book holds, 3000 years of thought compressed and narrated in a form so simple yet uncompromising that even a caveman with no prior cache of ideas or ways of thinking in his memory would be able to understand and speculate about such complex phenomenon and concepts as time and space, origins of the universe, the ideal code of living etc....  The genius and creative architecture  with which the stream of thought process since the beginning of human reason till the present era , from the discovery of fire to rocket science, from innate anarchism to democracy and capitalism, from Christianity and Hinduism to The Theory of Evolution, from the Bible and Vedas to the mystery of why we gaze into the stars, has been weaved into the fabric of a little girl's fictional story not only makes the story compelling ,unputdownable and spell binding  but also proves the power of fiction to take over the thread of narrative of real ideas and theories from geniuses such as Plato, Darwin etc..  as a better mode of transmission of knowledge to future generations than most thesis and papers.

This book is a TRIP in the way it slices, dices and categorizes ALL that you may have missed about our time on this planet, in this universe and in this WONDERLAND.