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Intercollegiate Studies Institute's "50 Worst Books of the 20th Century" (Non-fiction)

Earlier this year, the Modern Library published a list styled The Hundred Best Nonfiction Books of the Twentieth Century. A list of significant books can make a compelling statement about how we are to understand an age. In judging the quality of a book, one necessarily judges the perception and the profundity which the book displays, as well as the character of the book’s influence.

Yet many were dissatisfied with the several "Best" lists published in the past year, finding them biased, too contemporary, or simply careless. So the Intercollegiate Review (IR) set out to assemble its own critically serious roster of the Best—and the Worst—Books of the Century. To assist us in this task, we relied on the advice of a group of exceptional academics from a variety of disciplines.

(found at: http://www.isi.org/journals/ir/50best_worst/index.html)
1.
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The Authoritarian Personality (Studies in Prejudice)
by T.W. Adorno
 
2. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of The United States
by Charles A. Beard
 
3. Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Volume 1)
by Martin Bernal
 
4.
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Our Bodies, Our Selves
by Boston Women's Health Book Collective
 
5. After the Cataclysm: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II (Political Economy of Human Rights)
by Noam Chomsky
 
6. Soul on Ice
by Eldridge Cleaver
 
7. Democracy And Education
by John Dewey
 
8.
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The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective
by Harvey Gallagher Cox
 
9. The Promise Of American Life
by Herbert, Croly
 
10.
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POPULATION BOMB
by Paul R. Ehrlich
 
11. Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Analysis of the Sexual Impulse, Love and Pain, the Sexual Impulse in Women
by Havelock Ellis
 
12. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies
by Stanley Eugene Fish
 
13. The Affluent Society
by John Kenneth Galbraith
 
14. The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom
by Peter Gay
 
15. Scoundrel Time
by Lillian Hellman
 
16.
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Recollections of a Life
by Alger Hiss
 
17. The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell
by Aldous Huxley
 
18. The International Style
by Henry Russell Hitchcock
 
19. Profiles in Courage (Perennial Classics)
by John F. Kennedy
 
20. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Great Minds Series)
by John Maynard Keynes
 
21.
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Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
by Alfred Charles Kinsey
 
22. The Politics of Ecstasy (Leary, Timothy)
by Timothy Leary
 
23. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History
by Norman Mailer
 
24. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
by Herbert Marcuse
 
25. Only Words
by Catharine A. MacKinnon
 
26. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation (Perennial Classics)
by Margaret Mead
 
27. The Gnostic Gospels
by Elaine Pagels
 
28.
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The New Basis of Civilization (The John Harvard Library)
by Simon N. Patten
 
29.
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The Pentagon Papers As Published by the New York Times: The Secret History of the Vietnam War
by Neil Sheehan
 
30. Open Society and Its Enemies (Volume 1)
by Karl Raimund Popper
 
31. Christianity and the Social Crisis
by Walter Rauschenbusch
 
32. A Theory of Justice
by John Rawls
 
33. Ten Days That Shook the World (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)
by John Reed
 
34.
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Greening of America
by Charles Reich
 
35. The Function of the Orgasm: Discovery of the Orgone (Discovery of the Orgone, Vol 1)
by Wilhelm Reich
 
36. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy
by Carl Rogers
 
37. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
by Richard Rorty
 
38.
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Do It
by Jerry Rubin
 
39. Why I Am Not a Christian: And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
by Bertrand Russell
 
40.
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Woman and the new race
by Margaret Sanger
 
41. The Fate of the Earth and the Abolition: And, the Abolition (Stanford Nuclear Age Series)
by Jonathan Schell
 
42. The Age of Jackson (Back Bay Books (Series))
by Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr.
 
43. Beyond Freedom & Dignity
by B. F. Skinner
 
44. Against Interpretation: And Other Essays
by Susan Sontag
 
45.
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The Making of the English Working Class
by E. P. Thompson
 
46. The Courage to Be
by Paul Tillich
 
47.
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Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?  
48. The Open Conspiracy: H.G. Wells on World Revolution (Praeger Studies on the 21st Century)  
49. The New Freedom: A Call for the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People
by Woodrow Wilson
 
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Created by Robot Co-op on Nov 30, 2005.