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.

Stolen Charles Darwin book found, returned to owner.

The U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit has recovered a rare book of Charles Darwin's that was stolen from Mount Saint Vincent University Library in Bedford, Nova Scotia, Canada.

John Mark Tillman, of Fall River, Nova Scotia--a convicted antiquities smuggler--apparently stole Darwin's "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life" (such a pithy title!) and two other Darwin books from a glass case at the university back in 2012. I know, it's difficult to believe that books worth tens of thousands of dollars in a glass case without an alarm system were somehow stolen. I'm as shocked as you.

Tillman, ever the entrepreneur, then sold "On the Origin of Species" to a collector, who turned around and auctioned it off through Sotheby's in New York for $42,500.

But the good times were fleeting for Tillman. Authorities caught up to him. He was arrested, and pleaded guilty on eighty counts of theft. He was sentenced to nine years in prison.

No word on whether Mount Saint Vincent University Library is going to just hand over the book to a thief next time and cut out the middle man.

Morrissey's 'Autobiography' is a classic.

Morrissey is like a poor man's John Lennon, if John Lennon had a froggier voice and better hair. He was the lead singer of The Smiths, a British band hugely popular in their homeland, but D.O.A. in America outside of indie band aficionados and practitioners of crying in the bathroom.

Morrissey's fan base is intense and obsessive, enough that Morrissey can pull some strings with the production of his autobiography, entitled--appropriately enough--Autobiography. Pull what strings, you say? Like having his book published through Penguin Books' Classics imprint, heretofore only known for releasing books known to humanity for generations. Also known as classics.

Penguin created the division nearly 70-years ago when they first published Homer's The Odyssey. In the decades since, every book by Penguin's Classics imprint has been the stuff you read in high school and college, the stuff that win awards and places on book shelves, the stuff by the likes of Francis Bacon, Jane Austen, John Steinbeck... Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Wollstonecraft...Julius Caesar, Ovid, and Charles Darwin.

And now, because he demanded, it's also the stuff of Morrissey.