Thursday, October 15, 2015

Twenty academic books that changed the world--at least according to the U.K.



In advance of Academic Book Week next month, a panel of librarians, booksellers, and publishers in the U.K. have whittled down a list of two hundred academic books to twenty, creating a list they claim are the tomes that changed the world. Now, they want the general public to vote which book is the singularly most influential book that stands heads and shoulders above the rest.

Two works of the twenty are fiction: George Orwell's 1984, and the complete works of Shakespeare. (I gather they couldn't pick just one.)

The remaining eighteen books are all nonfiction, with a heavy leaning toward writers from Europe, and especially the United Kingdom. Indeed, only two writers are Americans by birth (Rachel Carson and Germaine Greer), and two were born elsewhere and moved to the United States at a later point in life (Albert Einstein and Thomas Paine).

Poor France only has one writer on the list: Simone de Beauvoir

I know I'm shocked--stunned, really--that a bunch of British experts find no use for anything French.

The complete list:

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Orientalism by Edward Said
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Complete Works by William Shakespeare
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson
The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein
The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Republic by Plato
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Ways of Seeing by John Berger



Don't kid yourself. No one from Asia, Africa, or South America ever wrote anything that changed the world. Everyone in the U.K. knows this.


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