Well, I can see that I'm going to put 99% of the books that I haven't read yet that appear on Time's list onto my "books I'll never read list." grin. I'm basing that on how I feel about the 25 books or so on this list that I have read--I absolutely hated all but a handful.
Geez, and wouldn't you know, right there at the top of the Science books list is one of my five top books that I wish I'd never read: Hawking's Brief History of Time. Yuck!
I do, however, bow to Time's tastes on a few of these titles, most especially when it comes to Strunk and White's Elements of Style. That's definitely a gold standard book when it comes to grammar, writing and composition.
Judy s. Bob W wrote:
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2088856,00.htmlAll-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books Politics and war, science and sports, memoir and biography — there's a great big world of nonfiction books out there just waiting to be read. We picked the 100 best and most influential written in English since 1923, the beginning of TIME ... magazineAutobiography / Memoir The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein Black Boy by Richard Wright Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown Maus by Art Spiegelman A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin On Writing by Stephen King Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov A Walk in the Woods by Bill BrysonBiographyThe Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill by William Manchester The Power Broker by Robert CaroBusinessCapitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser The General Theory by John Maynard Keynes How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie No Logo by Naomi Klein Unsafe at Any Speed by Ralph Nader What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson BollesCultureThe American Cinema by Andrew Sarris A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow Mystery Train by Greil Marcus The Story of Art by E.H. GombrichEssaysAgainst Interpretation, and Other Essays by Susan Sontag A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster WallaceFood WritingHow to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael PollanHealthAnd the Band Played On by Randy Shilts The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock The Joy of Sex by Dr. Alex Comfort The Kinsey Reports by Alfred Kinsey Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women's Health Book CollectiveHistoryThe Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown Carry Me Home by Diane McWhorter The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. ShirerIdeasThe Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr Orientalism by Edward Said Syntactic Structures by Noam Chomsky A Theory of Justice by John Rawls Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert PirsigNonfiction NovelsThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer In Cold Blood by Truman Capote Out of Africa by Isak DinesenPoliticsAll the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater God & Man at Yale by William F. Buckley Jr. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell The Making of the President by Theodore White The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter What It Takes by Richard Ben CramerScienceA Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead The Double Helix by James Watson The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins Silent Spring by Rachel Carson The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. KuhnSelf-Help / InstructionalThe Big Book by Alcoholics Anonymous Elements of Style by Strunk and WhiteSocial HistoryThe American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford Animal Liberation by Peter Singer The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich The Other America by Michael Harrington Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King Jr. Working by Studs TerkelSportsBall Four by Jim Bouton The Sweet Science by A.J. LieblingWarThe Civil War by Shelby Foote Dispatches by Michael Herr The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell Hiroshima by John Hersey The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
