Yesterday afternoon Charles Shields, who wrote “Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee” in 2006, posted an extremely interesting link on Facebook called “The 100 Greatest Non-fiction Books.”Compiled by the editors of guardian.co.uk, one of the world’s top online newspapers, this recommended reading list consists of 100 books in 17 categories. Here’s how they introduced their list – “After keen debate at the Guardian’s books desk, this is our list of the very best factual writing, organized by category, and then by date.”
Without further ado, here’s the list.
ART
1. The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes (1980)
2. The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich (1950)
3. Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972)
BIOGRAPHY
4. Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Giorgia Vasari (1550)
5. The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791)
6. The Diaries of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys (1825)
7. Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918)
8. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
9. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933)
CULTURE
10. Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag (1964)
11. Mythologies by Roland Barthes (1972)
12. Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
ENVIRONMENT
13. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
14. The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
HISTORY
15. The Histories by Herodotus (400BC)
16. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776)
17. The History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1848)
18. Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (1963)
19. The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson (1963)
20. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970)
21. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel (1970)
22. Shah of Shas by Ryszard Kapuscinski (1982)
23. The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm (1994)
24. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch (1999)
25. Postwar by Tony Judt (2005)
JOURNALISM
26. The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)
27. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
28. Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
LITERATURE
29. The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson (1781)
30. An Image of Africa by Chinua Achebe (1975)
31. The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)
MATHEMATICS
32. Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
MEMOIR
33. Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
34. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845)
35. De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)
36. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (1922)
37. The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi (1927)
38. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)
39. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
40. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951)
41. The Man Died by Wole Soyinka (1971)
42. The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975)
43. Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (2000)
MIND
44. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1899)
MUSIC
45. The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen (1998)
PHILOSOPHY
46. The Symposium by Plato (380 BC)
47. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (180 AD)
48. Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
49. The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621)
50. Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes (1641)
51. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (1779)
52. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781)
53. Phenomenology of Mind by G.W.F. Hegel (1807)
54. Walden by H.D. Thoreau (1854)
55. On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)
56. Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
57. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962)
POLITICS
58. The Art of War by Sun Tzu (500 BC)
59. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (1532)
60. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
61. The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791)
62. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
63. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
64. The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. DuBois (1903)
65. The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
66. The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon (1961)
67. The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967)
68. The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
69. Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988)
70. Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (2008)
RELIGION
71. The Golden Bough by James George Frazer (1890)
72. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
SCIENCE
73. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)
74. The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynmann (1965)
75. The Double Helix by James Watson (1968)
76. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
77. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
SOCIETY
78. The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan (1405)
79. Praise of Folly by Erasmus (1511)
80. Letters Concerning the English Nation by Voltaire (1734)
81. Suicide by Emile Durkheim (1897)
82. Economy and Society by Max Weber (1922)
83. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)
84. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)
85. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)
86. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
87. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didon (1968)
88. The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
89. Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (1975)
90. News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1996)
TRAVEL
91. The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta (1355)
92. Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869)
93. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (1941)
94. Venice by Jan Morris (1960)
95. A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977)
96. Danube by Claudio Magris (1986)
97. China Along the Yellow River by Cao Jinqing (1995)
98. The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald (1995)
99. Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban (2000)
100. Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (2002)
For more information about the books on this list, check out the original article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/14/100-greatest-non-fiction-books.
In the end, how many of the books mentioned above have you had the chance to read? Which did you like or dislike? Which would you recommend and why? Let us know in the comments section below.
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