EGAD

More Bookishness

Okay, new book meme, complimentary to the previous one, because it's 1 am, I'm still in the lab, and I need a break.

Earlier this year, the conservative weekly Human Events assembled a panel of "conservative scholars and public policy leaders" to prove that they really don't have anything better to be doing. Which is to say, they assembled a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries, plus a selection of honorable mentions.

How many have you read? All told, I get six.

1. The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong
4. The Kinsey Report, Alfred Kinsey
5. Democracy and Education, John Dewey
6. Das Kapital, Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy, Auguste Comte
9. Beyond Good and Evil, Freidrich Nietzsche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes¹

I only count those I've read in something like their entirety, of course. The odd chapter here and there from most all of these made cameo appearances in college. Most of these are plainly silly, but I will grant that Das Kapital has resulted in a number of cases of death by sheer boredom in liberal arts colleges the world over.

Below the fold, the Honorable Mentions, as it were. How many did you read?

Are some of these predictable and / or completely inane? Well, what did you expect? I declare the people who made this list to be harmful. The feelings would probably be mutual.

• The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
• What Is To Be Done, by V.I. Lenin
• Authoritarian Personality, by Theodor Adorno
• On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill
• Beyond Freedom and Dignity, by B.F. Skinner
• Reflections on Violence, by Georges Sorel
• The Promise of American Life, by Herbert Croly
• The Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin
• Madness and Civilization, by Michel Foucault²
• Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, by Sidney and Beatrice Webb
• Coming of Age in Samoa, by Margaret Mead
• Unsafe at Any Speed, by Ralph Nader
• Second Sex, by Simone de Beauvoir
• Prison Notebooks, by Antonio Gramsci
• Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson
• Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon
• Introduction to Psychoanalysis, by Sigmund Freud
• The Greening of America, by Charles Reich
• The Limits to Growth, by Club of Rome
• Descent of Man, by Charles Darwin

So I guess this breaks down roughly into social theory, and science they don't like. And, um, a bit of journalism. I suppose now that I've admitted to not having actually read Darwin in his entirety, creationist nutjobs will commence to ignore me even more than they do now.

¹ Yeah, right. After slogging through Smith and Marx, I'd had quite enough of economic theory.

² Discipline and Punish is the creepiest of the Foucault I have read, which is pretty messed up overall. But I haven't gotten to this one.