The Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books of the 20th Century, Part I

The second oldest “best-of” book list that I have in my bulging book list file at home is a yellow clipping from the April 30, 1999 edition of USA Today. In that edition of “The Nation’s Newspaper,” they gave readers a list of the Modern Library’s 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century published in English.
This is a great list, and since its publication, I’ve read more than a few of them just because they were on the list. Here’s what I’m calling Part I of that list, and those that I’ve read are in italics. Here are the first 33 books on the list:
1. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
2. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
3. Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
4. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Wolf
5. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
6. Selected Essays, 1917-1932 by T.S. Eliot
7. The Double Helix by James D. Watson
8. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
9. The American Language by H.L. Mencken
10. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
11. The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
12. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner
13. Black Boy by Richard Wright
14. Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster
15. The Civil War by Shelby Foote
16. The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
17. The Proper Study of Mankind by Isaiah Berlin
18. The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr
19. Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
20. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
21. The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White
22. An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal
23. Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
24. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
25. The Mirror and the Lamp by Meyer Howard Abrams
26. The Art of the Soluble by Peter B. Medawar
27. The Ants by Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson
28. A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
29. Arts and Illusion by Ernest H. Gombrich
30. The Making of the English Working Class by Edward P. Thompson
31. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
32. Principia Ethica by G.E. Moore
33. Philosophy and Civilization by John Dewey
And we’ll stop right there for today. Visit the site tomorrow for titles 34 through 66 and let us know which of the above you’ve read in the comments section below.