NYRB had the wonderful idea of taking the first and last few chapters of Henry Adams's history of the US 1801-1817, and printing them in a form you can slide into a windbreaker's pocket. Look for The Jeffersonian Transformation. For that matter NYRB's War and the Iliad is excellent brief reading, though I say less for Simone Weil's famous essay that for Rachel Bespaloff's "On the Iliad" and Herman Broch's "The Style of the Mythical Age".
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