Posted on 07/24/2006 8:01:24 AM PDT by Mr. Mojo
Earlier this year, Random House announced that it would release a list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. The publisher had enjoyed success (and controversy) with its 100 best novels; now it would do this. Here at National Review, we decided to get a jump on them by forming our own panel and offering our own list. Under the leadership of our reporter John J. Miller, we have done so. We have used a methodology that approaches the scientific. But-certainly beyond, say, the first 40 books-the fact of the books' presence on the list is far more important than their rankings. We offer a comment from a panelist after many of the books; but the panel overall, not the individual quoted, is responsible for the ranking. So, here is our list, for your enjoyment, mortification, and stimulation.
THE PANEL:
Richard Brookhiser, NR senior editor; David Brooks, senior editor of The Weekly Standard; Christopher Caldwell, senior writer at The Weekly Standard; Robert Conquest, historian; David Gelernter, writer and computer scientist; George Gilder, writer; Mary Ann Glendon, professor at Harvard Law School; Jeffrey Hart, NR senior editor; Mark Helprin, novelist; Arthur Herman, author of The Idea of Decline in Western History; John Keegan, military historian; Michael Kelly, editor of National Journal; Florence King, author of Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady; Michael Lind, journalist and novelist; John Lukacs, historian; Adam Meyerson, vice president at the Heritage Foundation; Richard John Neuhaus, editor-in-chief of First Things; John O'Sullivan, NR editor-at-large; Richard Pipes, historian; Abigail Thernstrom, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Stephan Thernstrom, historian; James Q. Wilson, author of The Moral Sense.
THE LIST:
1. The Second World War, Winston S. Churchill
Brookhiser: "The big story of the century, told by its major hero."
2. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Neuhaus: "Marked the absolute final turning point beyond which nobody could deny the evil of the Evil Empire."
3. Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
Herman: "Orwell's masterpiece-far superior to Animal Farm and 1984. No education in the meaning of the 20th century is complete without it."
4. The Road to Serfdom, F. A. von Hayek
Helprin: "Shatters the myth that the totalitarianisms 'of the Left' and 'of the Right' stem from differing impulses."
5. Collected Essays, George Orwell
King: "Every conservative's favorite liberal and every liberal's favorite conservative. This book has no enemies."
6. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper
Herman: "The best work on political philosophy in the 20th century. Exposes totalitarianism's roots in Plato, Hegel, and Marx."
7. The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis
Brookhiser: "How modern philosophies drain meaning and the sacred from our lives."
8. Revolt of the Masses, Jose Ortega y Gasset
Gilder: "Prophesied the 20th century's debauchery of democracy and science, the barbarism of the specialist, and the inevitable fatuity of public opinion. Explained the genius of capitalist elites."
9. The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. von Hayek
O'Sullivan: "A great re-statement for this century of classical liberalism by its greatest modern exponent."
10. Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman
11. Modern Times, Paul Johnson
Herman: "Huge impact outside the academy, dreaded and ignored inside it."
12. Rationalism in Politics, Michael Oakeshott
Herman: "Oakeshott is the 20th century's Edmund Burke."
13. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph A. Schumpeter
Caldwell: "Locus classicus for the observation that democratic capitalism undermines itself through its very success."
14. Economy and Society, Max Weber
Lind: "Weber made permanent contributions to the understanding of society with his discussions of comparative religion, bureaucracy, charisma, and the distinctions among status, class, and party."
15. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
Caldwell: "Through Nazism and Stalinism, looks at almost every pernicious trend in the last century's politics with stunning subtlety."
16. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West
Kelly: "For its writing, not for its historical accuracy."
17. Sociobiology , Edward O. Wilson
Lind: "Darwin put humanity in its proper place in the animal kingdom. Wilson put human society there, too."
18. Centissimus Annus, Pope John Paul II
19. The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn
Neuhaus: "The authoritative refutation of utopianism of the left, right, and points undetermined."
20. The Diary of a Young Girl, The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
Helprin: "An innocent's account of the greatest evil imaginable. The most powerful book of the century. Others may not agree. No matter, I cast my lot with this child." Caldwell: "If one didn't know her fate, one might read it as the reflections of any girl. That one does know her fate makes this as close to a holy book as the century produced."
21. The Great Terror, Robert Conquest
Herman: "Documented for the first time the real record of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. A genuine monument of historical research and reconstruction, a true epic of evil."
22. Chronicles of Wasted Time, Malcolm Muggeridge
Gilder: "The best autobiography, Christian confession, and historic meditation of the century."
23. Relativity, Relativity, Albert Einstein
Lind: "The most important physicist since Newton."
24. Witness, Whittaker Chambers
Caldwell: "Confession, history, potboiler-by a man who writes like the literary giant we would know him as, had not Communism got him first."
25. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn
26. Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis
Neuhaus: "The most influential book of the most influential Christian apologist of the century."
27. The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet
28. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed.
Helprin: "The infinite riches of the world, presented with elegance, confidence, and economy."
29. Up in the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell
30. The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton
Lukacs: "A great carillonade of Christian verities."
31. Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton
O'Sullivan: "How to look at the Christian tradition with fresh eyes."
32. The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling
Hart: "The popular form of liberalism tends to simplify and caricature when it attempts moral aspiration-that is, it tends to 'Stalinism.'"
33. The Double Helix, James D. Watson
Herman: "Deeply hated by feminists because Watson dares to suggest that the male-female distinction originated in nature, in the DNA code itself."
34. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Richard Phillips Feynman
Gelernter: "Outside of art (or maybe not), physics is mankind's most beautiful achievement; these three volumes are probably the most beautiful ever written about physics."
35. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Tom Wolfe
O'Sullivan: "Wolfe is our Juvenal."
36. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus
37. The Unheavenly City, Edward C. Banfield
Neuhaus: "The volume that began the debunking of New Deal socialism and its public-policy consequences."
38. The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud
39. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs
40. The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama
41. Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker
42. The Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter
Herman: "The single best book on American history in this century, bar none."
43. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes
Hart: "Influential in suggesting that the business cycle can be modified by government investment and manipulation of tax rates."
44. God & Man at Yale, William F. Buckley Jr.
Gilder: "Still correct and prophetic. It defines the conservative revolt against socialism and atheism on campus and in the culture, and reconciles the alleged conflict between capitalist and religious conservatives."
45. Selected Essays, T. S. Eliot
Hart: "Shaped the literary taste of the mid-century."
46. Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver
47. The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs
48. The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom
49. Ethnic America, Thomas Sowell
50. An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal
51. Three Case Histories, Sigmund Freud
Gelernter: "Beyond question Freud is history's most important philosopher of the mind, and he ranks alongside Eliot as the century's greatest literary critic. Modern intellectual life (left, right, and in-between) would be unthinkable without him."
52. The Struggle for Europe, Chester Wilmot
53. Main Currents in American Thought, Vernon Louis Parrington
King: "An immensely readable history of ideas and men. (Skip the fragmentary third volume-he died before finishing it.)"
54. The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johann Huzinga
Lukacs: "Probably the finest historian who lived in this century. "
55. Systematic Theology, Wolfhart Pannenberg
Neuhaus: "The best summary and reflection on Christianity's encounter with the Enlightenment project."
56. The Campaign of the Marne, Sewell Tyng
Keegan: "A forgotten American's masterly account of the First World War in the West."
57. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Hart: "A terse summation of the analytic method of the analytic school in philosophy, and a heroic leap beyond it."
58. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Bernard Lonergan
Glendon: "The Thomas Aquinas of the 20th century."
59. Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
Hart: "A seminal thinker, notwithstanding his disgraceful error of equating National Socialism with the experience of 'Being.'"
60. Disraeli, Robert Blake
Keegan: "Political biography as it should be written."
61. Democracy and Leadership, Irving Babbitt
King: "A conservative literary critic describes what happens when humanitarianism over takes humanism."
62. The Elements of Style, William Strunk & E. B. White
A. Thernstrom: "If only every writer would remember just one of Strunk & White's wonderful injunctions: 'Omit needless words.' Omit needless words."
63. The Machiavellians, James Burnham
O'Sullivan: "Burnham is the greatest political analyst of our century and this is his best book."
64. Reflections of a Russian Statesman, Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev
King: "The 'culture war' as seen by the tutor to the last two czars. A Russian Pat Buchanan."
65. The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin
66. Roll, Jordan, Roll, Eugene D. Genovese
Neuhaus: "The best account of American slavery and the moral and cultural forces that undid it."
67. The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
Brookhiser: "An epitome of the aging aesthetic movement that will be forever known as modernism."
68. The Second World War, John Keegan
Hart: "A masterly history in a single volume."
69. The Making of Homeric Verse, Milman Parry
Lind: "Genuine discoveries in literary study are rare. Parry's discovery of the oral formulaic basis of the Homeric epics, the founding texts of Western literature, was one of them."
70. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, Angus Wilson
Keegan: "A life of a great author told through the transmutation of his experience into fictional form."
71. Scrutiny , F. R. Leavis
Hart: "Enormously important in education, especially in England. Leavis understood what one kind of 'living English' is."
72. The Edge of the Sword, Charles de Gaulle
Brookhiser: "A lesser figure than Churchill, but more philosophical (and hence, more problematic)."
73. R. E. Lee, Douglas Southall Freeman
Conquest: "The finest work on the Civil War."
74. Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises
75. The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
Neuhaus: "A classic conversion story of a modern urban sophisticate."
76. Balzac, Stefan Zweig
King: "On the joys of working one's self to death. The chapter 'Black Coffee' is a masterpiece of imaginative reconstruction."
77. The Good Society, Walter Lippmann
Gilder: "Written during the Great Depression. A corruscating defense of the morality of capitalism."
78. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
Lind: "For all the excesses of the environmental movement, the realization that human technology can permanently damage the earth's environment marked a great advance in civilization. Carson's book, more than any other, publicized this message."
79. The Christian Tradition, Jaroslav Pelikan
Neuhaus: "The century's most comprehensive account of Christian teaching from the second century on."
80. Strange Defeat, Marc Bloch
Herman: "A great historian's personal account of the fall of France in 1940."
81. Looking Back, Norman Douglas
Conquest: "Fascinating memoirs of a remarkable writer."
82. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams
83. Poetry and the Age, Randall Jarrell
Caldwell: "The book for showing how 20th- century poets think, what their poetry does, and why it matters."
84. Love in the Western World
Brookhiser: "What has become of eros over the last seven centuries."
85. The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk
86. Wealth and Poverty, George Gilder
87. Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson
88. Henry James , Leon Edel
King: "All the James you want without having to read him."
89. Essays of E. B. White , E. B. White
Gelernter: "White is the apotheosis of the American liberal now spurned and detested by the Left (and the cultural mainstream). His mesmerized devotion to the objects of his affection-his family, the female sex, his farm, the English language, Manhattan, the sea, America, Maine, and freedom, in descending order-is movingly absolute."
90. Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
91. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
92. Darwin's Black Box, Michael J. Behe
Gilder: "Overthrows Darwin at the end of the 20th century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning."
93. The Civil War, Shelby Foote
94. The Way the World Works, Jude Wanniski
Gilder: "The best book on economics. Shows fatuity of still-dominant demand-side model, with its silly preoccupation with accounting trivia, like the federal budget and trade balance and savings rates, in an economy with $40 trillion or so in assets that rise and fall weekly by trillions."
95. To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson
Herman: "The best single book on Karl Marx and Marx's place in modern history."
96. Civilisation, Kenneth Clark
97. The Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes
98. The Idea of History, R. G. Collingwood
99. The Last Lion, William Manchester
100. The Starr Report, Kenneth W. Starr
Hart: "A study in human depravity."
Interesting to compare that list to the 1999 Modern Library list of 20th century non fiction...
01 Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams
02 William James The Varieties of Religious Experience
03 Booker T. Washington Up From Slavery
04 Virginia Woolf A Room of One's Own
05 Rachel Carson Silent Spring
06 T.S. Eliot Selected Essays, 1917-1932
07 James D. Watson The Double Helix
08 Vladimir Nabokov Speak, Memory
09 H.L. Mencken The American Language
10 John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
11 Lewis Thomas The Lives of a Cell
12 Frederick Jackson Turner The Frontier in American History
13 Richard Wright Black Boy
14 E.M. Forster Aspects of the Novel
15 Shelby Foote The Civil War
16 Barbara Tuchman The Guns of August
17 Isaiah Berlin The Proper Study of Mankind
18 Reinhold Niebuhr The Nature and Destiny of Man
19 James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son
20 Gertrude Stein The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
21 William Strunk, E.B. White The Elements of Style
22 Gunnar Myrdal An American Dilemma
23 Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell Principia Mathematica
24 Stephen Jay Gould The Mismeasure of Man
25 Meyer Howard Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp
26 Peter B. Medawar The Art of the Soluble
27 Bert Hoelldobler, Edward O. Wilson The Ants
28 John Rawls A Theory of Justice
29 Ernest H. Gombrich Art and Illusion
30 E.P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class
31 W.E.B. DuBois The Souls of Black Folks
32 G.E. Moore Principia Ethica
33 John Dewey Philosophy and Civilization
34 D'Arcy Thompson On Growth and Form
35 Albert Einstein Ideas and Opinions
36 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The Age of Jackson
37 Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb
38 Rebecca West Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
39 W.B. Yeats Autobiographies
40 Joseph Needham Science and Civilization in China
41 Robert Graves Goodbye to All That
42 George Orwell Homage to Catalonia
43 Mark Twain The Autobiography of Mark Twain
44 Robert Coles Children in Crisis
45 Arnold J. Toynbee A Study of History
46 John Kenneth Galbraith The Affluent Society
47 Dean Acheson Present at the Creation
48 David McCullough The Great Bridge
49 Edmund Wilson Patriotic Gore
50 Walter Jackson Bate Samuel Johnson
51 Alex Haley, Malcolm X The Autobiography of Malcolm X
52 Tom Wolfe The Right Stuff
53 Lytton Strachey Eminent Victorians
54 Studs Terkel Working
55 William Styron Darkness Visible
56 Lionel Trilling The Liberal Imagination
57 Winston Churchill The Second World War
58 Isak Dinesen Out of Africa
59 Dumas Malone Jefferson and His Time
60 William Carlos Williams In the American Grain
61 Marc Reisner Cadillac Desert
62 Ron Chernow The House of Morgan
63 A.J. Leibling The Sweet Science
64 Karl Popper The Open Society and Its Enemies
65 Francis A. Yates The Art of Memory
66 R.H. Tawney Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
67 Walter Lippmann A Preface to Morals
68 Jonathan D. Spence The Gate of Heavenly Peace
69 Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
70 C. Vann Woodward The Strange Career of Jim Crow
71 William H. McNeill The Rise of the West
72 Elaine Pagels The Gnostic Gospels
73 Richard Ellmann James Joyce
74 Cecil Woodham-Smith Florence Nightingale
75 Paul Fussell The Great War and Modern Memory
76 Lewis Mumford The City in History
77 James M. McPherson Battle Cry of Freedom
78 Martin Luther King, Jr. Why We Can't Wait
79 Edmund Morris The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
80 Erwin Panofsky Studies in Iconology
81 John Keegan The Face of Battle
82 George Dangerfield The Strange Death of Liberal England
83 Lawrence Gowing Vermeer
84 Neil Sheehan A Bright Shining Lie
85 Beryl Markham West With the Night
86 Tobias Wolff This Boy's Life
87 G.H. Hardy A Mathematician's Apology
88 Richard P. Feynman Six Easy Pieces
89 Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
90 James George Fraser The Golden Bough
91 Ralph Ellison Shadow and Act
92 Robert A. Caro The Power Broker
93 Richard Hofstadter The American Political Tradition
94 William Appleman Williams The Contours of American history
95 Herbert Croly The Promise of American Life
96 Truman Capote In Cold Blood
97 Janet Malcolm The Journalist and the Murderer
98 Ian Hacking The Taming of Chance
99 Anne Lamott Operating Instructions
100 Lord David Cecil Melbourne
Well, yeah...Chomsky's good, but if I had to choose between anything he wrote and Naughty Nurses, well...
I'm also surprised they omitted Belloc's The Servile State.
But, if they included Abolition of Man, The Elements of Style, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Witness, and The Gulag Archipelago, what they hey, they pass.
Cheers!
What in the bloody world is anything by this lying, brain donor clown doing on this list?
Bump for later reading.
Since Francis Fukuyama's ludicrous cockup of a book does not belong on the list, Aldrich's book should be at #40 in its place.
Since Atlas and Fountainhead are novels, they can't be on a list of non-fiction books, eh?
The book is "On Winning and Losing," by John Boyd.
James wasn't a New England native. Was he really more anti-immigrant than other American Protestants of his day?
Wikipedia has an interesting article on James's book, The American Scene, which provoked such views:
The book as it stands has been praised and damned, respected and dismissed. The extreme reactions may result from the contradictions inherent in the book itself. To take maybe the most notorious example, James indulged in racist bashing of black people as incapable of alertness and attention, then praised the "most accomplished" W.E.B DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk as "the only Southern book of any distinction for many a year."
Similarly, James was full of misgivings about unrestricted immigration and its effect on America's already thinly stretched social fabric. (Of course, many Americans share similar doubts about immigration to this day.) But he conceded that the strong assimilative forces of American life would work on the children of the immigrants, "the younger generation who will fully profit, rise to the occasion, and enter into the privilege" of full citizenship.
James also constantly criticized the materialism and greed he saw all around him in American business. But he again admitted that the result was a huge increase in material well-being for the average person: "this immense, vivid general lift of poverty and general appreciation of the living unit's paying property in himself." It was in this widespread prosperity "that the picture seems most to clear and the way to jubilation most to open."
On the whole James doesn't sound so very different from any conflicted 21st century American. Indeed, he came from a very conflicted background: quite comfortable yet outside traditional American society.
Henry James's grandfather was a (Protestant) immigrant from Ireland who made a fortune in real estate, his father an international intellectual wanderer. Henry became devoted to England, but his brother was passionately American, and his sister a fiery partisan of Irish freedom. James probably isn't today's cup of tea, but he saw and understood more than most people in his day -- or ours did.
Was it so ironic that James was so popular with 20th century intellectuals of immigrant stock (particularly the Jewish "New York Intellectuals" of the "Partisan Review School")? He comes across as a 19th century "New York Intellectual" himself.
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