"Earlier this year (1999), Random House announced that it would release a list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. The publisher had enjoyed success (and controversy) with its 100 best novels; now it would do this. Here at National Review, we decided to get a jump on them by forming our own panel and offering our own list. Under the leadership of our reporter John J. Miller, we have done so. We have used a methodology that approaches the scientific. But-certainly beyond, say, the first 40 books-the fact of the books' presence on the list is far more important than their rankings. We offer a comment from a panelist after many of the books; but the panel overall, not the individual quoted, is responsible for the ranking. So, here is our list, for your enjoyment, mortification, and stimulation."
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- The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
- The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
- Relativity by Albert Einstein
- The Civil War by Shelby Foote
- The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
- Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
- The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr and E. B. White
- Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
- The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- R. E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman
- The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling
- The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
- Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson
- Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
- Collected Essays of George Orwell by George Orwell
- Henry James by Leon Edel
- Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
- Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
- Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot by T. S. Eliot
- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
- The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P. Feynman
- The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
- The Second World War by Winston Churchill
- An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal
- Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
- Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
- Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter
- Encyclopedia Britannica by Encyclopedia Britannica
- Essays of E. B. White by E. B. White
- Main Currents in American Thought by Vernon L Parrington
- Modern Times by Paul Johnson
- Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene Genovese
- The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis
- The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter
- The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk
- The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich A. Hayek
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
- The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
- The Open Society by Karl Popper
- The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet
- The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek
- The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga
- Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
- Witness by Whittaker Chambers
- Balzac by Stefan Zweig
- Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises
- Centesimus Annus by Pope John Paul II
- Chronicles of Wasted Time by Malcolm Muggeridge
- Civilisation by Kenneth Clark
- Darwin's Black Box by Michael J. Behe
- Democracy and Leadership by Irving Babbitt
- Disraeli by Robert Blake
- Economy and Society by Max Weber
- Ethnic America by Thomas Sowell
- God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley, Jr.
- Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver
- Insight: A Study of Human Understanding by Bernard Lonergan
- Looking Back by Norman Douglas
- Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont
- Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams
- Poetry and the Age by Randall Jarrell
- Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe
- Rationalism in Politics by Michael Oakeshott
- Reflections of a Russian Statesman by Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev
- Scrutiny by F. R. Leavis
- Second World War by John Keegan
- Sociobiology by Edward O. Wilson
- Strange Defeat by Marc Bloch
- Systematic Theology by Wolfhart Pannenberg
- The ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound
- The Campaign of the Marne by Sewell Tyng
- The Christian Tradition by Jaroslav Pelikan
- The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
- The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs
- The Edge of the Sword by Charles De Gaulle
- The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
- The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton
- The Good Society by Walter Lippmann
- The Great Terror by Robert Conquest
- The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin
- The Idea of History by R. G. Collingwood
- The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker
- The Last Lion by William Manchester
- The Machiavellians by James Burnham
- The Making of Homeric Verse by Milman Parry
- The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn
- The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset
- The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes
- The Starr Report by Kenneth W. Starr
- The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling by Angus Wilson
- The Struggle for Europe by Chester Wilmot
- The Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield
- The Way the World Works by Jude Wanniski
- Three Case Histories by Sigmund Freud
- To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder
The reference card, reference sheet or cheat sheet of book recommendation. Why getting book recommendation from people you admire. Because geniuses often recognize other geniuses.
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