"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."

1. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
2. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
3. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
4. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson
5. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
6. Relativity by Albert Einstein
7. The Civil War by Shelby Foote
8. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
9. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
10. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr and E. B. White
11. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
12. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
13. R. E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman
14. The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling
15. The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
16. Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson
17. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
18. Collected Essays of George Orwell by George Orwell
19. Henry James by Leon Edel
20. Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
21. Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
22. Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot by T. S. Eliot
23. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
24. The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P. Feynman
25. The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
26. The Second World War by Winston Churchill
27. An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal
28. Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
29. Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
30. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter
31. Encyclopedia Britannica by Encyclopedia Britannica
32. Essays of E. B. White by E. B. White
33. Main Currents in American Thought by Vernon L Parrington
34. Modern Times by Paul Johnson
35. Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene Genovese
36. The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis
37. The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter
38. The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk
39. The Constitution of Liberty by Friedrich A. Hayek
40. The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
41. The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
42. The Open Society by Karl Popper
43. The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet
44. The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek
45. The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga
46. Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell
47. Witness by Whittaker Chambers
48. Balzac by Stefan Zweig
49. Bureaucracy by Ludwig von Mises
50. Centesimus Annus by Pope John Paul II
51. Chronicles of Wasted Time by Malcolm Muggeridge
52. Civilisation by Kenneth Clark
53. Darwin's Black Box by Michael J. Behe
54. Democracy and Leadership by Irving Babbitt
55. Disraeli by Robert Blake
56. Economy and Society by Max Weber
57. Ethnic America by Thomas Sowell
58. God and Man at Yale by William F. Buckley, Jr.
59. Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver
60. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding by Bernard Lonergan
61. Looking Back by Norman Douglas
62. Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont
63. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams
64. Poetry and the Age by Randall Jarrell
65. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe
66. Rationalism in Politics by Michael Oakeshott
67. Reflections of a Russian Statesman by Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev
68. Scrutiny by F. R. Leavis
69. Second World War by John Keegan
70. Sociobiology by Edward O. Wilson
71. Strange Defeat by Marc Bloch
72. Systematic Theology by Wolfhart Pannenberg
73. The ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound
74. The Campaign of the Marne by Sewell Tyng
75. The Christian Tradition by Jaroslav Pelikan
76. The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom
77. The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs
78. The Edge of the Sword by Charles De Gaulle
79. The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
80. The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton
81. The Good Society by Walter Lippmann
82. The Great Terror by Robert Conquest
83. The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin
84. The Idea of History by R. G. Collingwood
85. The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker
86. The Last Lion by William Manchester
87. The Machiavellians by James Burnham
88. The Making of Homeric Verse by Milman Parry
89. The Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Cohn
90. The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset
91. The Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes
92. The Starr Report by Kenneth W. Starr
93. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling by Angus Wilson
94. The Struggle for Europe by Chester Wilmot
95. The Unheavenly City by Edward C. Banfield
96. The Way the World Works by Jude Wanniski
97. Three Case Histories by Sigmund Freud
98. To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson
99. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
100. Wealth and Poverty by George Gilder