IF YOU WANT TO READ A REAL HISTORY BOOK, READ HOWARD ZINN’S A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. THAT BOOK WILL KNOCK YOU ON YOUR ASS: Time Magazine purports to list
the 100 best and most influential nonfiction books written in English since 1923, when the magazine debuted.
Sorry, any Dave Eggers fans out there, but...Really?!?
ReplyDeleteAs for the rest, pretty good, lots of usual suspects, and a reminder that I'm not as well-read as I usually like to believe.
I'd want to add Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns Of August" to the History section, though that's a pretty solid section already.
ReplyDeleteDoes outting "The Band Plays On" in Health bother anyone else?
Not sure why And the Band Played On being in Health should bother anyone. If you mean that is should be under politics, well, then so should all the biographies and half the books on this list. It's about AIDS - totally fine with me for it to be under Health.
ReplyDeleteHaven't read nearly enough of these, but I'm thrilled to see Stephen King's On Writing in here. He doesn't get recognized often on these sorts of lists, and On Writing is wonderful. I'm also thrilled to see Working on here.
ReplyDeleteIn the Sports category, I want to put in a plug for a book I just finished - As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires, by Bruce Weber. Absolutely fascinating, and my perspective on watching a baseball game is forever altered.
By the way, I do not know a single person (present company probably excepted) who managed to get all the way through Godel Escher Bach.
I think I did, but it's been a long time.
ReplyDelete1. I don't think that even Dave Eggers is comfortable with putting AHWoSG in total non-fiction.
ReplyDelete2. Nice (and, of course, not at all surprising) to see Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of Great American Cities on the list, but I would think that Frances Fitzgerald's Cities on a Hill is an essential and indispensable companion piece (and works very well with And the Band Played On, incidentally). But I always say that, because it was one of my favorite books.
3. Any accurate list of "most influential" books has to include The Antitrust Paradox.
4. Ball Four may have been more widely read, but it certainly was not more influential than Moneyball. Moneyball has framed the dominant discussion in baseball for the succeeding decade. Ball Four is a book about getting drunk and chasing tail and how knuckleballers can throw every day.
Oh, and one other suprising omission: Common Ground, in social history.
ReplyDeleteThat health category is a weird one. Three of those are really what I would think of as more "Self Help/Instructional".
ReplyDeleteI got through Godel Escher Bach while auditing a discrete math class, right after college when I was underemployed. I'm not sure I could do it now!
ReplyDeleteMoneyball is one I would want on the list, along with Richard Rhodes's Making of the Atomic Bomb.
ReplyDeleteHmm. "Social history" doesn't mean what they think it means.
ReplyDeleteBut Ball Four was deeply influential on sports journalism, if not sports itself. It ushered in the era in which the Mickey Mantles would no longer be protected, and in which athletes in general were no longer to be as lionized. (I also wonder: even if Moneyball hadn't been written, wouldn't other teams still be trying to copy the A's success? Is the real answer to that question not Moneyball but rather of of Bill James's early Baseball Abstracts?) (Grammar Q: or is it A's's?)
ReplyDeleteAnalytic philosophy major and pianist -- why would one read all of it? It isnt that type of book. It is very clear what points he's going to be making, where, and why.
ReplyDeleteI'd put And the Band Played On in Social History -- it's about AIDS in the same way many of the other books on the list use their primary subject (funerals, Wal-Mart, etc.) to talk about the larger issues of our world at a particular point in time. And yes, the Health list is largely instructional.
ReplyDeleteWould have loved to see The Right Stuff on the list, also. Surely qualifies as influential, if nothing else.
OK, then what does it mean?
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'd say that its role in helping JFK avoid nuclear armageddon over Cuba probably qualifies The Guns of August pretty fricking influential!
ReplyDeleteNice list. Would have been nice to see "Fun Home" in the biography section. Also, I wonder how close Taylor Branch's MLK trilogy came.
ReplyDeleteSure, Bill James made the whole field possible. But Moneyball popularized it. If you were to graph the growth of statistical understanding of baseball among lay people, you would very easily be able to isolate the point at which Moneyball appeared. And James defined the field of baseball analytics, but Moneyball galvanized baseball and baseball talk into two camps -- pro-analytics and anti-analytics. Before Moneyball, quantitative analysis was just a thing; after Moneyball, it was either your thing or the enemy's thing.
ReplyDeleteI think the three most important books about the United States in the 20th century are:
ReplyDeleteRichard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Daniel Yergin, The Prize
Marc Reiser, Cadillac Desert
Guns of August certainly deserves a place on any list. I'd also want to give a big shout out to two books I've read in the last ten years that have fundamentally altered my view of two events: first, regarding the Fall of France -- Strange Victory -- which shows that it was neither overwhelming German firepower nor French cowardice that cost France the war, but unimaginitive intelligence interpreration on the part of the French and Belgian indecisivieness in throwing its lot out of the notion of neutrality. (Hint: If you are mountanous country that's not in the way, and has avoided foreign wars since the 1700s, you can probably stay out of the war. If you are a flat country wedged between countries that fought wars 70 and 25 years previously, don't count on saying out of the war.)
The second, Racing the Enemy, by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, regarding the surrender of Japan, really puts the lie to the notion that it was the atomic bomb that forced the surrender of the Empire of Japan. Rather, it was the Soviet Union's declaration of war that finally forced it. There's a lot to this book that gets criticized as "revisionist history" -- it's not, at least not in the sense that it tries to recast the moral decisions based on some impossibly high standard of knowledge or the wholesale imposition of modern values on historical actors. It's certainly the most comprehensive book on the endgame in the Pacific and bears reading.
Thanks for that second one. It's getting a weird second wind in the press right now, and Hasegawa can't figure out why.
ReplyDeleteLet's suppose Moneyball never gets published. Theo Epstein still works under Kevin Towers, gets hired by the Red Sox in 2002 (before the publication of Moneyball) and the Red Sox win the WS in 2004. Don't analytics (and in particular, the discussion of OBP and OPS) still become much more prominent in sports discourse anyway?
ReplyDeleteIs there a new end-of-the-war book coming out? Sometimes that precipitates a look at some older stuff.
ReplyDeleteCould be, but the stuff coming out recently hasn't mentioned it.
ReplyDeleteGrassroots history, history of those without power (or, at least, less power than those who populate political history, legal history, or intellectual history), history "from the bottom up."
ReplyDeleteMore to the point, almost none of those are *history* - I think they use that to mean sociology (which is also not exactly right, but closer). Nothing wrong with that, but most are contemporary studies.
Also missing is William Cronon's excellent Nature's Metropolis.
ReplyDeleteJon Krakauer. Into the Wild/Into Thin Air essentionally created the modern-non-fiction-tale-written-as-adventure-novel genre.
ReplyDeleteInto the Wild is required reading in my 9th grade son AP english class this year. I find that interesting, on a number of fronts.
Mutiple posts, I know, but so many good books on the Time list and better books in the comments.
ReplyDeleteMore from me: John Keegan-The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command; Hamton Sides- Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers; Iris Chang-The Rape of Nanking; Joe Gallaway-We Were Soldiers Once and Young; Tim Egan- The Worst Hard Time; Jared Diamons- Guns Germs & Steel
A little suprised by the omission of anything by Ambrose...has he been largely discredited at this point? Even for Undaunted Courage?
Re Ambrose: yes. http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2010/04/26/100426ta_talk_rayner
ReplyDeleteThere's quite a lot about both the public health aspects of AIDS (community health education in the context of sexual mores and blood banks) and the actual search for the infectious agent -- how'd they figure out it was a virus? what was happening in the different labs? -- in And the Band Played On. Social history would work too, or even public policy, but I think health is as good as anything else.
ReplyDeleteMost of the books I thought would be major omissions if left out were on the list, and there wasn't much that I thought was just bizarre -- makes me want to read the ones I haven't read.