"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