100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books.

Discussion in 'The Back Room' started by Terry O'Keefe, Jun 16, 2011.

  1. Terry O'Keefe

    Terry O'Keefe Well-Known Member Administrator

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    Sadly I have only read 1 on this list....Mark Twains Innocents abroad. I did see the movie In Cold Blood though!! But I guess that doesn't count.

    100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books

    Interesting that there is no category for Religion and the Bible is not amongst the 100 greatest books.

    edit: there is a category for Religion...my bad. But no Bible.
     
  2. vicm

    vicm New Member

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    8) Have just started Ann Coulter's "Demonic"
     
  3. JO'Co

    JO'Co Well-Known Member

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    :idea:
    I've read 19 of the 100; parts of around 20 others and a couple of them I've never heard of...that was an English list after all.

    I can't give myself too much credit for reading many of them, because they were assigned to me in college. Without being directly threatened by my professors, I never would have read the following on my own:
    The Feminine Mystique- Betty Friedan
    The Female Eunuch- Germaine Greer
    On Origins of Species- Charles Darwin

    Some of these books were part of my studies as a Poli Sci/History major:
    Communist Manifesto- Karl Marx
    The Prince- Niccolo Machiavelli
    Diary of a Young Girl- Anne Frank
    The Art of War- Sun Tzu
    On Liberty- John Stuart Mill
    Silent Spring- Rachel Carson
    Walden- HD Thoreau

    There were related books on the list that I read on my own, which weren't assigned to me, but I recommend them:
    Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee- Dee Brown
    Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass- Frederick Douglass
    Souls of Black Folk- WEB DuBois
    The Medium is the Massage- Marshall McLuhan
    The Gulag Archipelago- Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
    A Brieg History of Time- Stephen Hawking

    Must read book for Terry:
    The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test- Tom Wolfe

    This was one of the most entertaining books that I've ever read. It's the story of writer Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and his Merry Pranksters riding around in the "Magic Bus" that The Who later sang about. Kesey had been a student at Stanford who volunteered to participate in a scientific experiment using a new drug called LSD. It was all legal and his writing was making a lot of money...and then they met the Hell's Angels...and they toured with Gerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead...and then...
    http://www2.lib.virginia.edu/exhibits/sixties/kesey.html

    Other Must Reads for Skyboxers:
    In Cold Blood- Truman Capote
    Innocents Abroad- Mark Twain
     
  4. Terry O'Keefe

    Terry O'Keefe Well-Known Member Administrator

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    I wondered how many you would have read, but I never would have guessed 19 !!! Forced or not that's pretty stout!
     
  5. JO'Co

    JO'Co Well-Known Member

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    I've always been a reader. It was the way I grew up. I had no direction at home when I was a boy, but luckily for me, my grandmother's house on the corner was very old and filled with books and magazines going back to the turn of the (19th-20th) century. My lay-about, drunken uncles were there too and they were always willing to engage me in arguments to prove how ignorant I was...