UNLIMITED Audiobooks and eBooks

Over 40,000 books & works on all major devices

Get ALL YOU CAN for FREE for 30 days!

The Defendant

G. K. Chesterton

Book Overview: 

A collection of reprinted articles on a wide-range of subject, all in the unique style of G. K. Chesterton. Using wit, paradox, and good humor he “defends” a series of seeming harmless things that need no defense, and in so doing he exposes many of the broken assumptions and dogmatic notions of secular humanism and other trends of his age and of ours.

How does All You Can Books work?

All You Can Books gives you UNLIMITED access to over 40,000 Audiobooks, eBooks, and Foreign Language courses. Download as many audiobooks, ebooks, language audio courses, and language e-workbooks as you want during the FREE trial and it's all yours to keep even if you cancel during the FREE trial. The service works on any major device including computers, smartphones, music players, e-readers, and tablets. You can try the service for FREE for 30 days then it's just $19.99 per month after that. So for the price everyone else charges for just 1 book, we offer you UNLIMITED audio books, e-books and language courses to download and enjoy as you please. No restrictions.

Book Excerpt: 
. . .e end of all this is that maddening horror of unreality which descends upon the decadents, and compared with which physical pain itself would have the freshness of a youthful thing. The one hell which imagination must conceive as most hellish is to be eternally acting a play without even the narrowest and dirtiest greenroom in which to be human. And this is the condition of the decadent, of the aesthete, of the free-lover. To be everlastingly passing through dangers which we know cannot scathe us, to be taking oaths which we know cannot bind us, to be defying enemies who we know cannot conquer us—this is the grinning tyranny of decadence which is called freedom.

Let us turn, on the other hand, to the maker of vows. The man who made a vow, however wild, gave a healthy and natural expression to the greatness of a great moment. He vowed, for example, to chain two mountains together, perhaps a symbol of some great relief, or love, or aspiration. Short as the mo. . . Read More

Community Reviews

Maybe too many five-star reviews lately for them to be fully trusted? Ding somebody else. 19 highlights in 71 pages speaks for itself.

A lately admitted bromance with Chesterton might make him, and five-star ratings overrepresented, but I'll plead to that. I'm so enthralled that Kindle Unlimited's ac

I have such a crush of G. K. In this collection, he sets out to find the "diamonds in the dustheap"--all the good in the things that we think are silly, or sentimental, or useless (babyworship, for example, or idealistic pastoral). He is awfully clever. I love optimism.

It may seem that common things need no defender until The Defendant arose. This book will remind you how much we have lost by continually assaulting what ought be good and given. And it will make you laugh.

"Ci farebbe bene a volte essere come una semplice finestra: aperti, illuminati ed invisibili." (Difesa dell’umiltà, p. 79)

G.K. Chesterton in defence of all sorts of things and, as usual, laying it down.

View More Reviews