100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books

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Published in The Guardian newspaper in the UK on 14th June 2011. Please don’t make alterations to this list as it is as published in The Guardian.

Art: 1-3

Biography: 4-9

Culture: 10-12

Environment: 13-14

History: 15-25

Journalism: 26-28

Literature: 29-31

Mathematics: 32

Memoir: 33-43

Mind: 44

Music: 45

Philosophy: 46-57

Politics: 58-70

Religion: 71-72

Science: 73-77

Society: 78-90

Travel: 91-100

Pages: 1

  1. 1.
    The Shock of the New
    by Robert Hughes
  2. 2.
    The Story of Art: Pocket Edition
    by E.H. Gombrich
  3. 3.
    Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series
    by John Berger
  5. 5.
    The Life of Samuel Johnson (Penguin Classics)
    by James Boswell
  6. 6.
    The Diary of Samuel Pepys: A Selection (Penguin Classics)
    by Samuel Pepys
  7. 7.
    ?
    Eminent Victorians, The Illustrated Edition
    by Lytton Strachey
  8. 8.
    Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography
    by Robert Graves
  9. 9.
    The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
    by Gertrude Stein
  10. 10.
    ?
    Notes on Camp
    by Susan Sontag
  11. 11.
    Mythologies (Vintage Classics)
    by Roland Barthes
  12. 12.
    Orientalism
    by Edward W. Said
  13. 13.
    Silent Spring
    by Rachel Carson
  14. 14.
  15. 15.
    The Histories
    by Herodotus
  17. 17.
    ?
    The History of England
    by Thomas Babington Macaulay
  18. 18.
    Eichmann in Jerusalem (Penguin Classics)
    by Hannah Arendt
  19. 19.
    The Making of the English Working Class
    by E. P. Thompson
  21. 21.
    Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression
    by Studs Terkel
  22. 22.
    Shah of Shahs
    by Ryszard Kapuscinski
  23. 23.
    The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991
    by Eric Hobsbawm
  25. 25.
    Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945
    by Tony Judt
  26. 26.
    Journalist and the Murderer
    by Janet Malcolm
  27. 27.
    The Electric Kool - Aid Acid Test
    by Tom Wolfe
  28. 28.
    Dispatches
    by Michael Herr
  29. 29.
  32. 32.
    Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, 20th Anniversary Edition
    by Douglas R. Hofstadter
  33. 33.
    Confessions (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  35. 35.
    De Profundis (Dodo Press)
    by Oscar Wilde
  36. 36.
    Seven Pillars of Wisdom
    by T.E. Lawrence
  37. 37.
    An Autobiography (Penguin Modern Classics)
    by M. K. Gandhi
  38. 38.
    Homage to Catalonia (Penguin Modern Classics)
    by George Orwell
  39. 39.
    The Diary of a Young Girl
    by Anne Frank
  40. 40.
    Speak Memory An Autobiography (Penguin Modern Classics)
    by Vladmir Nabokov
  41. 41.
    The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka
    by Wole Soyinka
  42. 42.
    Periodic Table (Penguin Modern Classics)
    by Primo Levi
  43. 43.
    Bad Blood - A Memoir
    by Lorna Sage
  44. 44.
    The Interpretation of Dreams (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Sigmund Freud
  46. 46.
    THE SYMPOSIUM (GREAT IDEAS S.)
    by PLATO
  47. 47.
    Meditations (Penguin Classics)
    by Marcus Aurelius
  48. 48.
    Montaigne: Essays
    by Michel de Montaigne
  49. 49.
    The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York Review Books Classics)
    by Robert Burton

Pages: 1

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Created by klarusu on Jun 15, 2011.
 

Comments

JohnVKaravitis

I wonder how they came up with this list. — 1 year ago

I have to wonder about these lists. It’s a good list, and the Guardian is a respectable news source. However, wouldn’t this list have to be updated periodically? Unless you keep this list static, but then you’d miss out on adding a “better” book to the list. And how do you decide which book to remove from that list? It seems to me that these lists create more argument than one would believe. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading lists such as this, but again, how were they created, and how do you update them? John V. Karavitis

Jan 05, 02:28PM | 0 comments | Reply to this



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