The Spy in the Sandwich

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

10:37 AM | The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Only silly conservatives can compile a list such as this. But as Franklin Delano Roosevelt once famously said, "A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk forward." Hahaha! (Master Ninja, meanwhile, provides a tongue-in-cheek commentary about the whole process.) Check out Human Events's book-burning list...

1. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels
2. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
3. Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong
4. The Kinsey Report by Alfred Kinsey

5. Democracy and Education by John Dewey
6. Das Kapital by Karl Marx
7. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
8. The Course of Positive Philosophy by Auguste Comte

9. Beyond Good and Evil by Freidrich Nietzsche
10. General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes

Honorable Mention

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 Foucault
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

It's easy to deduce that conservatives really, really hate it if anyone rocks the boat with regard such sacred cows as capitalism, patriarchy, race, prudish sexuality, and WASPish religiosity. But before Kinsey came along, for example, people earnestly believed you can grow hair on your palms when you masturbate! A harmful book? Despite some faults in Kinsey's methodology, I still say, revolutionary! While it is a sad testament of our world to have something like Hitler's Mein Kampf seeing publication, I have always believed that that book has long been overshadowed by the more powerful Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.

So what's next, a book-burning event a la Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451? If that's the case, here's a list of my own nominees for the burning:

The Complete Collected Poems by Maya Angelou
The Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
The Bridges of Madison Country by Robert James Waller
How to Talk to a Liberal by Anne Coulter
The Left Behind Series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins
Who's Looking Out For You? by Bill O'Reilly
A Victor, Not A Butcher by Edward H. Bonekemper III
Inside the Asylum by Jed Babbin
Misunderestimated by Bill Sammon
State of Fear by Michael Crichton
Endgame by Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney and Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely
Colossus by Niall Ferguson
Presidential Leadership edited by James Taranto and Leonard Leo
The French Betrayal of America by Kenneth Timmerman
Restoring the Lost Constitution by Randy E. Barnett
Rewriting History by Dick Morris
Betrayal by Linda Chavez
7 Myths of Working Mothers by Suzanne Venker
Affirmative Action Around the World by Thomas Sowell
The Compleat Gentleman by Brad Miner
The Mind and the Brain by Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley
Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under My Bed! by Katharine DeBrecht

Come on, let's be brutal troglodytes like the Human Events people for a while. Nominate books for the burning, and explain earnestly why....

[via kristine and luis are listening]

Labels: books, issues