This article both cracked me up and pissed me off all at the same time. The "10 Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Century," eh? Where to begin?
Well, for starters, there's the humor value in that any group would even make such a list. You'd think that after all this time, the people behind these sorts of things would learn that their derision makes anything they say attractive by default to a large portion of the population. They might as well call the list "10 Books You Must Read."
Can a book really be harmful? Only in the video-games-lead-to-school-violence way of thinking, I'd have to say. I mean, I'd argue that Hitler himself did a lot more harm in the 20th century than his book Mein Kampf did.
Even if you do subscribe to the notion that a book can be harmful, can you really take any list seriously that includes their entry for #7: The Feminine Mystique? Yeah, that was really harmful, encouraging all those women to get out of the kitchen and seek fulfilling careers for themselves. It's bad enough that they'd been given the right to vote 43 years earlier.
The people who made this list probably wish every copy of these books could be rounded up and burned. Me, I think we should burn people who want to ban books.
4 comments:
"conservative scholars" - isn't that a trifle oxymoronic?
I've actually read some of those and I'm not dangerous.
(I only wish I had time to read all of the books on this list.)
There are some noted conversative scholars in American academia, and several of them aren't very fond of President Bush. Some, including one at the University of Chicago, have gone so far as to declare the Bush Administration very non-conservative.
Can we truly blame Keynes and FDR for the current debt? They undoubtedly set things in motion, but the current debt is a result of the "policies" of the Bush (43) Administration.
This list was compiled so that GOP-fearing Christians could shield children's minds from political extremism and nonconformity. Conversative demagogues want to protect future voters from making the mistake of not punching holes next to GOP candidates. Of course, if these demagogues actually read the Bible without the GOP filter, they'd see that the Bible itself asks its reader to put it to the test. I find Darwin, Freud, etc. intriguing, but I still have faith and conviction in my beliefs.
While I haven't read it myself, many have criticized The Population Bomb as dated.
If this list were extended to the 21st century, Freakonomics would make the list because it dares draw a correlation between Roe v. Wade and a systemic drop in crime in America.
if i read books, I'm sure I would have read some of those
If I wasn't at work, I'd be laughing out loud. The Kinsey Report? That was factual research!
And how evil can a book be that's named "Democracy and Education". This is the description of why it's supposed to be so evil:
"...he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking 'skills' instead..."
Lord forbid we stop cramming one branch of religion's ideas of morals and down their necks and brainwashing them with hard facts just to, you know, teach kids how to think for themselves.
Don't even get me started on that venomous paragraph about Betty Friedan, but E already covered that one.
And with truly evil people like Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, and Ralph Nader on the runners up list, how could they possibly go wrong?
It's good that the top banner of this "publication" specifies that it is free of "liberal bias". Because it's certainly not free of bias. Funny how their brand of bias is okay and mine isn't.
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