So the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has issued a list of the fifty best and worst books of the century.
Here is a press release about it, printed in it’s entirety.
Here are direct links to the Best[/url"] and [url=http://www.isi.org/publications/ir/50worst.html]Worst books.
Any thoughts? And while we’re on the subject, I’ve been out of academia for a while. Do I care who the Intercollegiate Studies Institute is?
Livin’ on Tums, Vitamin E and Rogaine
Dammit.
I think their point of view is pretty clear from their web page:
Third on their list of the worst books (non-fiction books, written in english) of the century is
I think they were overly influenced by their “mission statement” when making up their lists.
La franchise ne consiste pas à dire tout ce que l’on pense, mais à penser tout ce que l’on dit.
H. de Livry
I agree with you there, Jacques. This seems to be an extremely biased list.
Of course all these lists, the top movies of the century, the other book lists, etc., are totally subjective. This one’s a little worse than most, but personally, I’m sick of the lot.
-andros-
No kidding.
Hal Lindsey’s The Late, Great Planet Earth, and its sequel, The '80s: Countdown to Armageddon were every bit as bad, if not worse, than such “prophetic” works on their worst-50 list as The Population Bomb, and yet Lindsey’s works didn’t appear on that list.
I am absolutely certain that this is because his works were of a biblical nature, and were therefore considered “beyond reproach” by this decidedly Xian group.
(And besides, their worst 50 list didn’t include Silent Spring or Bankruptcy 1995, so how good can it be? 
)
Gee, what tipped you off – their statement that the title of “The Abolition of Man” sums up the liberal agenda?
I really hate lists for the following reasons:
Hell is Other People.
Not to mention that they take as settled a criticism concerning the work of Margaret Mead that is still very much in progress, and whose premises appear to based on some very dubious “evidence.”
"I prefer shows of the genre, “World’s Blankiest Blank.”
Besides, I am absolutely certain that the worst book of this century has Fabio on the cover.
I’m a bit troubled by the mathematical implications I found in the lists, compiled by “experts” on behalf of an entity that claims to be an “educational organization.”
To wit: the presence of The Autobiography of Malcolm X on the list of the 50 best and the 50 worst books of the twentieth century leads one inescapably to the conclusion that there have been exactly 99 non-fiction works published (in English) during the twentieth century. I base this on the fact that The Autobiography of Malcolm X is the only book to appear on both lists. I don’t have accurate numbers in front of me, but I suspect that this is a tad low.
Or perhaps Unca Cecil’s books were originally published either in a different language or during a different century.
Best book: “Eternally Yours for Now” - A Harlequin Romance.
Worst book: (three way tie)
This space for rent.
Is their take on Kinsey biased? From what I’ve heard, he did have rather loose standards of evidence.
But a view that did surprise me:
Although the 50 Best and 50 Worst lists are obviously created by someone with a clear conservative bias, there are a number of books on the 50 Best list that wouldn’t bother a liberal that much. The books by Adams, Lewis, Eliot, Arendt, Brooks & Warren, Chesterton, Coppleston, Dawson, Foote, Genovese, Jacobs, Lovejoy, Merton, Niebuhr, O’Connor, Orwell, Percy, Santayana, Strunk & White, Turner, Trilling, Turner, Washington, Watson, Wilson, Wittengenstein, and Malcolm X all have some fans among liberals.
Friedman, Von Hayek, and Schumpeter are generally considered among liberals to be conservative economic ideologues who’ve biased their theories to fit their pre-existing ideas. Although I don’t think that very many liberals would consider Witness to be an important book, there has been a trend among liberals recently to give Chambers more credit. The general feeling is that Toynbee and Johnson try too hard to make their theories of history fit and end up stretching the facts. Most of the rest of the books on the 50 Best list are usually considered by liberals to be not very important or obviously slanted.
Incidentally, do the writers of this list really want to push H. L. Mencken as a model for modern conservatives? Mencken was usually considered a liberal during his lifetime, mostly because of his criticisms of fundamentalists. The facy is though that he thought he was better than anyone else. He also made fun of women, Jews, and blacks. He despised the entire human race. He’s one of those people who sound great in single-sentence quotes but bad at longer lengths.
The 50 Worst list has bigger problems. It seems likely now that Meade did try too hard to make the data fit her pre-existing theories, but she wasn’t lying about anything. It also seems that her informants were making stuff up just to fool her. But this doesn’t disprove her theories. It just means that someone less easily fooled will have redo all her research before anything can be said one way or another. Pretty much everybody now agrees that Kinsey’s surveys don’t meet modern scientific standards. Before him though no one was even trying to do scientific studies of sexual behavior. There’s also a majority view among liberals (if not quite a general agreement) that Bernal tries too hard to find evidence of Egyptian influence on Greeks and African influence on Egyptians. What’s more, unlike Meade and Kinsey, Bernal never had a significant period of being considered a top-notch, significant researcher among liberals. I’m surprised that the list doesn’t include any of Freud’s works. Most liberals now consider that Freud’s theories are weak and that his data is biased.
Given that nobody has taken the Webbs’s book or its viewpoint seriously in at least forty years, including it on the list seems awfully picky. I think the same thing can be said of the Leary, the Charles Reich, the Wilheim Reich, and the Rubin books, which nobody ever took very seriously.
You would get the idea from their comments on the books that they believe that liberals all agree on a single agenda and push this agenda in their books. But notice that they include both one of Chomsky’s books and Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which Chomsky utterly trashed in a famous review. I think that for the makers of these lists liberalism is some big undifferentiated mass of opinions that they can’t be bothered to sort through.
Their complaints about the Galbraith, the Keynes, and the Patten books are the reverse of their comments about the Friedman, Von Hayek, and Schumpeter books. They like economists whose theories are biased toward their opinions and they dislike ones who are biased against their opinions.
Their comment on Soul on Ice is simply a lie. Cleaver was a rapist (and spent years in jail for it). He wasn’t a murderer. The whole point of his book was his realization that he can’t take revenge against the world for what it had done to him. Cleaver’s entire life was confused - he was a drug dealer, then a rapist, then a convict mad at the whole world, then a follower of Gandhi, then a political writer, then a Black Panther, then an exile looking for answers, then a born-again Christian, then a Mormon, and then I gave up trying to follow his political and philosophical twists. You can argue that he didn’t live up to his ideals. Maybe you can argue that no one can live up to his ideals. But the fact is that the ideals he expouses in Soul on Ice are important.
The criticism of The Secular City is also ridiculous. They seem baffled that Harvey Cox refused to move to the suburbs along with them. They can’t understand how anyone would want to live with blacks and poor people.
The Hiss book never influenced anybody. By 1988 the tide of opinion was already turning away from him.
Profiles in Courage: Let’s see - the handsome son of a rich man wrote (with some ghost-writing help) a not particularly good book, which won, probably undeserved, a Pulitzer. He had very slightly liberal opinions. He spent three terms in the House, a term and a third in the Senate, and was elected President. He was neither particularly good nor particularly bad in those offices. His father’s money may have helped his campaigns, but it’s unlikely that his book had much to do with it. The book is now mostly unread. In other words, John Kennedy is a liberal version of Dan Quayle, plus 30 extra I.Q. points.
They don’t even try to deny that the Pentagon Papers tell the truth. They just complain that it ended up annoying a President they like instead of two Presidents that they didn’t like.
Their inclusion of the Malcolm X book on both lists shows the problems with any such lists. Most books contain large amounts of both good and bad things. A few contain both brilliant expositions of the truth and bizarrely confused nonsense. The notion that you can separate all books into two lists of good books and bad books is absurd. The only real use of a list of recommended books that someone gives you is to add it to all the other lists as just one more viewpoint. Liberals write just as much nonsense as conservatives, but they don’t find it necessary to act as if there’s an unchangable canon of great books.
Some additions and corrections to my last post:
Of course they don’t include any Freud. They limit themselves to non-fiction works in English.
How interesting that they include biographies of two defenders of slavery, Jefferson and Lee (and, yes, of one former slave, Washington). So they consider Robert E. Lee a “great Southern traditionalist”, not someone who took on a bad cause. And how interesting that they think that the designing of the atomic bomb is the high point of American civilization.
They include The Right Stuff. I haven’t read this book. Is it as biased as the movie? I disliked the movie because it just stuck to the notion that many people have that the astronauts were everything in the space program, while the scientists and politicians were miserable slime who interfered with the heroic astronauts. In other words, if you’re handsome, athletic, and fairly smart, you can become an astronaut, who are godlike beings, while if you’re merely smart and become a scientist, you’re worthless garbage. The treatment of Johnson and (to a lesser degree) Eisenhower is despicable too. The film treats Kennedy nicer than he deserves though. What the movie is saying is that all politicians are slime, except handsome ones like Kennedy.
In the third paragraph of my last post, I should have started the third sentence with “The fact is though that . . .” Also, Margaret Mead’s name is spelled “Mead”, not “Meade”, of course.
It’s kinda funny, I’ll bet the people at ISI make jokes about ‘politically correct’ types, without any idea that they’re exactly what they ridicule.
The site says of The Right Stuff:
You see, Wendell, of course scientists are worthless slimebags. They’re all out to promote their atheistic satanic evilutionist [TM] agenda, whose sole purpose is to Take God Out Of The Schools. If God had meant for Man to use his brain, He wouldn’t’ve given us schoolmasters who thwack our knuckles whenever we point out a contradiction in the Holy Bible.
That’s right! Every day, I go to work and pry into the secrets of rocks… Of course, I ignore all the overwhelming evidence I find to support creationism, like secret messages from God etched onto tiny grains of feldspar! Instead, I distort my data in order to distract the unsuspecting public and win more souls for my sweet lord Satan.
I will agree with one of the top 5 “best”: Toynbee’s “Study of History”.
Your Professional Evilutionist,
Pantellerite,
Minion of Lord Satan and His Deceptions.
Pantellerite: Am I not supposed to be able to guess who you really are? Too obvious to mention. 
However would the originator of this thread agree that the novel, “And the Band Played on” was one of the best books?
Obvious to you, maybe. Go ahead and guess away; I’m dying to find out who I am!
Worst: A Brief History of Time, by Steven Hawking. Oh, wait…
[QUOTEThey limit themselves to non-fiction works in English.[/QUOTE]
It fails on both counts. Oh, well…
Best: The Kenneth Starr Report. Classic, baby, classic.
The IQ of a group is equal to the IQ of the dumbest member divided by the number of people in the group.