Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

Children get the sanded-down version: a man tied to the ground by people six inches high. The real book is colder, stranger, and far funnier. Lemuel Gulliver, ship's surgeon, washes ashore four times, and each landfall is a lens ground to a different power. In Lilliput, two empires wage war over which end of an egg to crack, and the joke is how familiar the fervor feels. In Brobdingnag, a giant king studies humanity through a magnifying glass and pronounces it a pest, and you cannot honestly fault his evidence. Then Swift removes the comedy: among the serene, reasoning horses of the last voyage, the human creature appears as the Yahoo, filthy and shrieking, and Gulliver can never again unsee it. The triumph is the voice, the flat and reasonable monotone of a man reporting only what he saw, dismantling the whole species without once raising itself. He comes home sane by every measure but the human one.