Male-Bashing Bibliophiles Blacklist Bad Books

As a culture, we let literacy off the hook too easily. Some books are even worse for you than black tar heroin, and book-burning, divorced from its historical associations, deserves at least as much consideration as Turn Off Your TV Week. Thus we applaud the first "best of" list we've ever seen that doesn't feel like a marketing tie-in,Human Events'"Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries."

The time constraintHuman Eventsput on the exercise precluded both the Koran andThe Purpose-Driven Lifefrom the running, but even so, the results do not disappoint.The Kinsey Reportplaces fourth,The Feminine Mystiqueseventh, and the works of Charles Darwin, Ralph Nader'sUnsafe at Any Speed, Rachel Carson'sThe Silent Spring, and Paul Ehrlich'sThe Population Bomb, amongst others, all earn Honorable Mentions. But talk about your lack of diversity -- eight out of the top ten books on the list were authored by white Western males! Surely, the faith-based conservatives atHuman Eventsaren't blaming the world's woes on them, are they? Everyone knows it's mostly women, minorities, and foreigners who've been screwing things up.— GREG BEATO

UPDATE: Actually, there is a marketing angle that we overlooked:Human Eventslinks the titles to Amazon.com, which means, despite the evil of Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler, and Ralph Nader,Human Eventsis eager to profit from their labor. Wily capitalists!

 Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries [Human Events]