Posted on 07/24/2006 8:01:24 AM PDT by Mr. Mojo
James was hugely influential on F.R. Leavis, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and their idea of 'tradition'. A concept that Saul Bellow understood was meant to keep people like him out.
Written before Dover over?
I love reading a good critic who I disagree with. It's why I keep going back to David Thomson's Biographical Encyclopedia of Film.
That's a great book. I hope he updates it one more time but he probably won't. He just published a History of Hollywood a year or two back.
Ditto on that. Didn't see your post before I made mine.
Bump for "Parliament of Whores." That's a terrific book, and survives being dated much better than most political humor. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wandering around the American consulate in Pakistan in his bathrobe is *still* funny! Zot, I can see him now ...
Actually, if you're going for simply the most influential books, Morris & Whitcomb's The Genesis Flood did for young-earth creationism what Silent Spring did for envirowhakoism. Darwin's Black Box is a sideshow by comparison.
This list is for non-fiction books.
We agree about Darwin's Black Box.
I am pleased to see Witness that high in the list. It is one of the most stunning books I've ever read. I am even more pleased to see Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus there but it doesn't really belong - it is very, very difficult and indecipherable in a bad translation. But if all you take away is the first line - "The world consists not of things, but of facts," you will blow away most of the Marxian crap that so infested the 20th century and all of the ridiculous postmodern puppet show that has pretended to replace philosophy with nihilism.
Very, very pleased to see Paul Johnson included. Orwell's Homage to Catalonia was the break of a brilliant mind from obscurantist garbage by way of a real war. Eggs aren't broken to make Lenin's omelet, people are. What else? Wolfe gets a double portion and it's deserved. Keegan is there. Churchill, of course.
A couple of modest suggestions - Human Action by Ludwig von Mises and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. And maybe History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.
I didn't see Naughty Nurses In Bondage but dang it, that's a classic too...
I'll second your Wm. Shirer nomination.
I'll second your Wm. Shirer nomination.
I'll third that. It's in my personal top ten.
...after he forsook America and moved to Europe (England?).
What misplaced arrogance.
Perhaps it's on the list, but I didn't see it - but I'd put in the treatise on the American Language by H.L. Mencken. It's still in print, highly readable and surprisingly current.
"the ridiculous postmodern puppet show that has pretended to replace philosophy with nihilism."
What! Noam Chomsky -- voted the greatest intellectual on the planet, ever, I mean like you know dude, like ever -- not on the list!!!! Awe man, he's smarter than the Democrat chimp president we voted in. <s/
some of the folks who drew up this list badly need a headbash delivered with none other than "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer
The list is interesting and for my 2 cents I would've included T. Wolfe's "From BauHaus to Our House" insted of either Mau-Mau or Electric Kool-Aid. Although both of those books are good in their own right, BauHaus destroyed Modern Architecture completely, utterly and immediately.
I also would have liked to have seen B Tuchman somewhere on the list simply because she made history readable and in that way has been quite influential, I think, on a number of historians since then.
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