The Guardian has produced a list of what it considers to be the 100 greatest non-fiction books. Lists like this are always going to be subjective, but it is interesting how many historical and political books have made it on to the list, with 11 and 13 books respectively, compared with only one for Mathematics and five for science. This suggests that either the subjects of History and Politics lend themselves more naturally to books that can be considered great literature, or that those consulted for the article were somewhat biased in their favour. What do you think?
Here are the choices (Click for more details here)
History
The Histories (Herodotus: c400 BC)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon: 1776)
The History of England (Thomas Babington Macaulay: 1848)
Eichmann in Jerusalem (Hannah Arendt: 1963)
The Making of the English Working Class (EP Thompson: 1963)
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (Dee Brown: 1970)
Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression (Studs Terkel: 1970)
Shah of Shahs (Ryszard Kapuściński: 1982)
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (Eric Hobsbawm: 1994)
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Familes (Philip Gourevitch: 1999)
Postwar (Tony Judt: 2005)
Politics
The Art of War (Sun Tzu: c500 BC)
The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli: 1532)
Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes: 1651)
The Rights of Man (Thomas Paine: 1791)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Mary Wollstonecraft: 1792)
The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: 1848)
The Souls of Black Folk (WEB DuBois: 1903)
The Second Sex (Simone de Beauvoir: 1949)
The Wretched of the Earth (Franz Fanon: 1961)
The Medium is the Massage (Marshall McLuhan: 1967)
The Female Eunuch (Germaine Greer: 1970)
Manufacturing Consent (Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman: 1988)
Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky: 2008)
No comments:
Post a Comment