C'mon, fess up: Who among us has not pretended, at least once, to have perused a certain classic work, perhaps one of those signature tomes by Darwin or Machiavelli or Plato?

Yeah, that's what we thought. Well now, it's vastly easier to put the kibosh on this all-too-common canard, thanks to Grove/Atlantic's splendid series, "Books That Changed the World," in which noteworthy authors provide insight into great works ranging from "The Prince" to "The Qur'an" to "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey."

The series came about, in part, because a publisher was chagrined over a recurring, not-so-little white lie: Sure, I've read Karl Marx's masterpiece.

"I used a dinner-party test to gauge aspiration," said Toby Mundy, head of Atlantic Books' London division and the progenitor of the series. "Had I, or anyone I knew, ever pretended to have read one of these books at a dinner party? If the answer was 'yes,' the book was a contender.

"As I'd never pretended to have read Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' or Hobbes' 'Leviathan,' those titles were ruled out. But equally, repeated bluffing by me down the years about 'The Origin of Species' and 'Das Kapital' made me realize that they would probably make it into the series."

The goal: deconstruct, humanize and contextualize what Mundy calls "books in the Western canon that every educated person had heard of and none of them had read." When Mundy approached Grove/Atlantic CEO Morgan Entrekin with the idea -- "getting a smart person to write about the book for the general reader," in Entrekin's words -- the project came together rather quickly.

Some of the series' authors were obvious choices because of their backgrounds (religion expert Karen Armstrong on the Bible, Darwin scholar Janet Browne for "The Origin of Species"), while others proved to be natural fits because of their affinity for the original authors.

Christopher Hitchens, for example, could rightly be called a modern-day Thomas Paine -- and actually has been by the Independent of London -- so having him explore "Rights of Man" was a natural. The same notion held with another acerbic, conservative-leaning author, P.J. O'Rourke. "Both Morgan and I knew that P.J. was tremendously informed about economics," said Mundy, "and that he was probably the only person alive who could write a smart, informative, laugh-out-loud funny book on [Adam Smith's] 'The Wealth of Nations.'"

Francis Wheen, author of a Karl Marx biography and a left-leaning commentator himself, fit on both counts. And his engrossing take on "Das Kapital" nails the series' mission: bringing to life the man (brilliant but easily distracted), his times (über-turbulent), how the book came together (slowly and unsurely), and its influence then and now.

Wheen's cast of characters would have made Robert Altman jealous: Friedrich Engels, of course, and Trotsky, Lenin et al., but also Balzac, Hegel, Mary Shelley's monster, H.G. Wells, Jean-Paul Sartre and even George Soros. And Wheen doesn't go easy on his subject, whether trying to clarify what he calls Marx's "fractured narrative and radical discontinuity" or providing a platform for the man's many critics.

Like most of the "Books That Changed the World," Wheen's work is concise (121 pages) and incisive, affording readers a chance to become thoroughly versed in a text that once, and seemingly forever, loomed like a chore or a bore.

There's still time to get one before that next dinner party.

Bill Ward • 612-673-7643