Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Books Bad, Very Bad They Are

Preposterous Universe points us to something very interesting via Wonkette) who points to an enlightening list at Human Events Online -- The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. As voted on by leading conservative thinkers!
  • The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels
  • Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
  • Quotations from Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong
  • The Kinsey Report, Alfred Kinsey
  • Democracy and Education, John Dewey
  • Das Kapital, Karl Marx
  • The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan
  • The Course of Positive Philosophy, August Comte
  • Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche
  • General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes
Did you ever you think you would see Mein Kampf on the same book list with The Feminine Mystique?

However the list of runners-up is just as interesting and in many ways more telling.
  • The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich
  • What Is To Be Done, V.I. Lenin
  • Authoritarian Personality, Theodor Adorno
  • On Liberty, John Stuart Mill
  • Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B.F. Skinner
  • Reflections on Violence, Georges Sorel
  • The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly
  • Origin of the Species, Charles Darwin
  • Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault
  • Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, Sidney and Beatrice Webb
  • Coming of Age in Samoa, Margaret Mead
  • Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader
  • Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
  • Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci
  • Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
  • Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
  • Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud
  • The Greening of America, Charles Reich
  • The Limits to Growth, Club of Rome
  • Descent of Man, Charles Darwin
I, for the life of me, can't figure out why Silent Spring is on the list. But as Sean points out it's Darwin's appearance that is most telling. If this really does
represent how the so-called mainstream conservatives think then they are really intellectually bankrupt.


You do have to consider who was on the committee however and that list is pretty interesting in itself.
Harry Crocker, Vice President & Executive Editor, Regnery Publishing, Inc.
Phyllis Schlafly, President, Eagle Forum
among others...

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