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This list of the 50 most influential books of the last 50 years or so comes from a site I stumbled across and there is nothing by which to judge its judges. In fact, it comes from one of those sites that seem to be fairly prominent these days, they look like blog but are there to promote online colleges or the like. Regardless, I found the list at least interesting and, at times, a bit confounding. Still, I found it intriguing enough to mention.
At the outset, it should be noted that whoever compiled it says, “Not all the books on this list are ‘great.’ The criterion for inclusion was not greatness but INFLUENCE. All the books on this list have been enormously influential.” The compilers also recognize reality, trying to balance the list between books everyone buys and doesn’t read (can you say Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time?) and books that weren’t widely read but were quite transformative.
So, here’s the list with the ones I’ve read in bold and the ones sitting unread on my bookshelves (or Nook) underlined. On a few, I there are parenthetical comments, one of which is repeated frequently with one variation.
- Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958)
- Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) (Why so high on the list? It “reinvented the science fiction genre.”)
- Robert Atkins’ Dr Atkins’s New Diet Revolution (1992, last edition 2002) (C’mon. Who didn’t read this in the ’90s?)
- Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006)
- Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987)
- Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003) (C’mon. Who didn’t read this in the ‘oughts?)
- Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970)
- Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962)
- Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957)
- Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People (1989)
- Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box (1996)
- Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997)
- Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980)
- Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1962)
- Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963)
- Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962)
- Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (1995)
- Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man (1971)
- John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992) (C’mon. Who didn’t read this in the ’90s?)
- Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) (Does watching the television series count?)
- Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988, updated and expanded 1998)
- Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961)
- Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, last edition 1978)
- Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981)
- Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
- Alasdair McIntyre’s After Virtue (1981, last edition 2007)
- Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987)
- Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984-89) (Four novels.)
- Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965)
- National Commission on Terrorist Attacks’ The 9/11 Commission Report (2004)
- Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind (1988)
- Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957)
- John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971, last edition 1999)
- J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series (seven volumes, 1997-2007) (I’ve read only the first three or four.)
- Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988)
- Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980)
- Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001)
- Amartya Sen’s Resources, Values and Development (1984, last edition 1997)
- B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971)
- Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (in three volumes, 1974-78) (I read only the first volume.)
- Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capitalism (2000)
- Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946, last edition 2004)
- Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan (2007, last edition 2010)
- Mao Tse-tung’s The Little Red Book, aka Quotations From Chairman Mao (1966)
- Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life (2002)
- James D. Watson’s The Double Helix (1969)
- E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975)
- Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
- Muhammad Yunus’ Banker to the Poor (1999, last edition 2007)
What I find interesting isn’t so much that I’ve read 14 of the books on the list; it’s that I am now somewhat abashed at having read about 20 percent of those. It seems to reflect that, to some extent, influence is dictated by whether the crowd follows something rather than innovation.
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
E.M. Forster, “A Book That Influenced Me,” Two Cheers For Democracy
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- Chapter and verse on why readers get a benefit from their novel experiences (“…people who spend every spare moment with their nose stuck in a novel are actually better at both relationships with others and understanding of the world in general than those who don’t read much or whose reading is exclusively factual.”)
- Reading Is Elemental (“…without reading, there can be no learning; without learning, there can be no sense of a larger world; without the sense of a larger world, there can be no ardor to find it; without ardor, where is joy?”) (via)
Blog Headline of the Week
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent.
Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick: Interviews
It still is not a good thing when, rather than hold a hearing on sanctions, a judge says he “assumes [an attorney] is as incompetent as he appears.” (via)
A Maine school district is not liable for damage caused when four members of its wrestling team converted a motel room into a makeshift sauna to help a teammate “make weight” for a wrestling match.
A Kentucky man lost his medical malpractice suit over the amputation of his penis without consent. (In fairness, his penis was found to have cancer during a circumcision operation.)
Mistrial results from juror’s desire to punch defense attorney (I’d lay pretty good odds this is far from the only juror who wanted to punch an attorney or two during a trial.)
Claiming it owns the word, the U.S. Olympic Committee has issued a formal letter of its intent to sue the “Redneck Olympics” over use of the word “Olympic.”
Four federal courts of appeals have now ruled that a criminal defendant is presumed prejudiced only when his or her attorney sleeps through a “substantial portion” of the trial.
I don’t think this is what the term a designated driver means.
John Stamos to star in new TV series as — wait for it …. part of “a law firm on earth composed of other dead lawyers.”
We hate to interrupt
But it’s against the law to jump off this bridge
You’ll just have to kill yourself somewhere else
Dead Kennedys, “Soup Is Good Food,” Frankenchrist
It sounds a bit like a script for a television show or film under the Disney umbrella. A small high school in a town of 250 people decides to start a football team. The goalpost crossbars are built out of two by fours. The players don’t wear jerseys. They wear sweatshirts with the numbers painted on them. Yet despite the fact no one on the team has played the game before, they not only win their first game, they go a perfect 8-0 in their first season. But was just the beginning of what would become a national record 61 consecutive victories.
 Yet as Marc A. Rasmussen’s Six: A Football Coach’s Journey to a National Record details, that’s exactly what the Honkers of now-defunct Claremont High School in northeastern South Dakota did between 1947 and 1953. The win streak wasn’t because Claremont played patsies. Rather, the coach, Willis “Bill” Welsh, made it a point for the team to take on not just nearby schools but powerhouses, often undefeated themselves, from South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota.
Six also provides insight into a unique aspect of American football. The title comes from the fact the Honkers (so named because the town is along the flyway for migrating Canadian geese) was one of several thousand teams in the country playing six-man football. Rasmussen examines the history of six-man football, invented in 1934 by Stephen Epler, a coach in Nebraska. Epler was looking for a way for small high schools to have a football team. At that time, the number of towns with a population less than 500 greatly exceeded those with more than 500 people. Add in the Depression and any football program needed to be as inexpensive as possible. Rule changes, such as an 80-yard long field that was also narrower than the standard field and requiring 15 yards for a first down, made the game a wide open affair.
Claremont was the size community for which the sport was intended. Before closing in 1970, the high school never exceeded 40 total students. Despite that, the team would draw 1,000 people or more to some of its games during its streak. Although South Dakota would eventually go from six-man to nine-man high school teams as consolidation meant fewer and fewer very small schools, the six-man game remains popular in Texas.
Rasmussen breaks the story down into three basic parts. Readers learn some basics about Welsh, the sport, the team and the community in an introduction built around a November 11, 1948, game in Claremont against Hankinson, N.D. The game was billed as being for the six-man championship of the Dakotas — and was indicative of the types of opponents Welsh would seek out. Although Claremont was 17-0 at that point, Hankinson came into the game with a 36 game winning streak, one which ended by a score of 40-0.
The first major section of the book is a well researched and nicely written biography of Welsh. Despite a relative paucity of sources, Rasmussen initially takes the reader from Welsh’s success as a high school athlete in Aberdeen, S.D., to his first year as a running back at the University of Illinois, where he was Red Grange’s backup. Injuries quickly ended his Illinois career and Welsh would return to Aberdeen, where he attended and played football at Northern Normal College, a teacher’s college that is now Northern State University. Six describes not only his journey as a successful coach in football, basketball and track in South Dakota and Iowa but his family life and the death of his only son at age five, a tragedy that would eventually lead Welsh to Claremont. There, he served as a second father to the boys he coached. The last section of the book covers the winning streak itself and some of the regional and national attention it garnered.
Six is aided by Rasmussen’s straightforward prose and a narrative style that helps the reader better grasp the times and community. Still, despite the book being only roughly 150 pages long, there is some repetition, particularly between the introduction and section describing the winning streak. Perhaps more frustrating is that the latter consists in large part of one paragraph recaps of the games, the leading scorers for the game and who was on the team each year. It is short on personal recollections or stories, or at least there are very few directly quoted. Granted, more than half a century has elapsed since the games were played but Rasmussen notes in his preface that he interviewed a number of the players, cheerleaders and fans. Adding more of a personal touch from those individuals would have bolstered the story of the streak. Still, the book stands as a readable and pleasant recounting of a part of sports history that might otherwise soon be forgotten.
By the way, it isn’t the winning streak alone that makes this a tale for a family friendly movie. The Honkers didn’t let the end of the streak end their success. The team won its other remaining game that year and went undefeated the next two years, giving it a 78-1 record over its first eight years. Not bad for a student body unfamiliar with the game until they started playing it.
Hardly more than a bump in the prairie … [Claremont had] terrain so flat the ditch beside the road represented the largest change in elevation[.]
Marc Rasmussen, Six: A Football Coach’s Journey to a National Record
In today’s sound-bite world, it is easy to forget that cogent maxims can be more than buzzwords and arise from more substantive expressions of thought. Although they may encapsulate a principle or theme, they aren’t necessarily designed to be a 15-second snippet.
 Wisdom of Progressive Voices, compiled and edited by Joanne Boyer, is a good reminder of that. The book profiles and collects quotations of 23 Americans Boyer says “have articulated a ‘forward thinking’ view of political, social, and environmental issues of their times.” The book aims to show a broad spectrum of “progressive” America from the Progressive movement until today. Thus, in addition to contemporary figures, those profiled and quoted include Robert LaFollette, John Muir, Jane Addams, Theodore Roosevelt and Rachel Carson.
Broken down by individual and not subject matter, it is apparent the book includes at least two topics that seem to take it beyond a collection of standard political subjects. One is the explicit inclusion of environmental issues. Not only is it often referred to, the specific inclusion of John Muir and Rachel Carson reinforces the prominence of the subject. The other topic is the deleterious effects of war and the aim of an ongoing commitment to peace. These topics arise in part because Boyer sets out with a specific definition of “forward thinking.” To her it requires recognizing the interconnectedness of all human beings, that hate tears us apart, that education is a treasure and that peace is always far more profitable than war.
Although a relatively slim volume (less than 150 pages), Wisdom of Progressive Voices contains far more than quotations, though. Not only does it contain profiles of the 23 individuals, it contains a list of books where the reader can learn more about each person. Still, there are a couple areas where it is a bit lacking. One is that, with rare exception, none of the quotations is sourced. Just as the list of books allows the reader the opportunity to explore the individuals, citing sources would enable a person to investigate a particular speech, essay or book. The other potential downfall is the book does not categorize or index any of the quotes by subject. As a result, if you generally recall a particular quote but not its source, you would have to page through the book until you found it.
Certainly, neither omission is substantive and does not undercut the content. The first volume in a planned series called The Wisdom Voices in which future volumes are planned to include international voices, Wisdom of Progressive Voices is both an engaging read and a handy reference for those interested in bona fide Progressive thought.
Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., quoted in
Joanne Boyer, Wisdom of Progressive Voices
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