10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help - Hardcover

Benjamin Wiker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596980559 ISBN 13: 9781596980556

Publisher: Regnery, 2008

Synopsis

You've heard of the "Great Books"?
These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors' bad ideas are still popular and pervasive--in fact, they might influence your own thinking without your realizing it. Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker. In his scintillating new book, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World (And 5 Others That Didn't Help), he seizes each of these evil books by its malignant heart and exposes it to the light of day. In this witty, learned, and provocative exposé, you'll learn:

* Why Machiavelli's The Prince was the inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand)
* How Descartes' Discourse on Method "proved" God's existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego
* How Hobbes' Leviathan led to the belief that we have a "right" to whatever we want
* Why Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto could win the award for the most malicious book ever written
* How Darwin's The Descent of Man proves he intended "survival of the fittest" to be applied to human society
* How Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil issued the call for a world ruled solely by the "will to power"
* How Hitler's Mein Kampf was a kind of "spiritualized Darwinism" that accounts for his genocidal anti-Semitism
* How the pansexual paradise described in Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be a creation of her own sexual confusions and aspirations
* Why Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was simply autobiography masquerading as science

Witty, shocking, and instructive, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World offers a quick education on the worst ideas in human history--and how we can avoid them in the future.

About this title

From the Author:

10 Books that Screwed Up the World is an excellent book to get for your children before they go off to college--a book that will give them insight into the kinds of ideas that have done so much damage to our society, ideas they're likely to encounter in their classes. This book is a companion to my 10 Books Every Conservative Must Read, which takes readers on a tour of the good books, the books that your children should be reading even if their professors aren't assigning them.

From the Back Cover:

Praise for 10 Books That Screwed Up the World

"Benjamin Wiker has read the worst books in Western civilization so you don't have to. In this sprightly, witty, engaging survey of bad guys ranging from Marx to Hitler, Nietzsche to Betty Friedan, Professor Wiker's poison pen portraits are great critical aids to analyzing some of the worst ideas that have ever contaminated Western civilization. Professor Wiker recommends actually reading the books--but his own book is a whole lot more fun."

--THOMAS E. WOODS, JR., PH.D. author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

"A valuable contribution to the most urgent intellectual project of our day: restoring our culture to that healthy state in which the truisms that most people take for granted are actually true. If you want to know where Western civilization ran off the rails, read this book. And if you want to help get us back on track, buy extra copies and see what you can do to get them into doctor's office waiting rooms, faculty lounges, and your local public library. Wiker has the goods on the authors of our current confusion about (among other things) human nature, morality, sex, economics, law, and government--this book will open many eyes."

--ELIZABETH KANTOR, PH.D. editor of the Conservative Book Club and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide(tm) to English and American Literature

About this edition

• Publisher: Regnery
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1596980559
• ISBN 13: 9781596980556
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260