100 best nonfiction books. Hmmm…

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Since I’ve become a nonfiction fanatic, I was thrilled beyond speech to see the announcement, on Red Room Library, that Time magazine had published a list of the all-time best nonfiction books.
Then I wondered, What kind of list is this gonna be? One of those horrible “books you should read” lists, or one of the lists of books a person actually would want to read.
And I’m thinking it’s a little of both.
Turns out, I’ve read only 10 of the books on the list (shown in bold font in the list below). I’ve perused/skimmed 3 more (in bold italics).
There are 8 books on the list that I’m interested in reading (shown in ALL CAPS ITALICS).
Autobiography / 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 Bryson

Biography
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill by William Manchester
The Power Broker by Robert Caro

Business
Capitalism 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 Bolles

Culture
The 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. Gombrich

Essays
Against 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 Wallace

Food Writing
How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher
Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Health
And 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 Collective

History
THE 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. Shirer

Ideas
The 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 Pirsig

Nonfiction Novels
The 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 DINESEN

Politics
All 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 Cramer

Science
A 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. Kuhn

Self-Help / Instructional
The Big Book by Alcoholics Anonymous
Elements of Style by Strunk and White

Social History
The 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 Terkel

Sports
BALL FOUR BY JIM BOUTON
The Sweet Science by A.J. Liebling

War
The 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
What do you think of this list?

11 thoughts on “100 best nonfiction books. Hmmm…”

  1. jenclair

    I've only read 15 of these books, but I see so many that have been on my lists that I've not gotten around to reading yet.

    The list inspires me to check out titles both old and new to me!

    P.S. Working by Studs Terkel is wonderful and so is the soundtrack from the musical. My daughters can still sing some of the songs from this.

    Working, the musical.

  3. Citizen Reader

    I say, Meh.
    Looks like the same old NF books you always see listed on these same old "you should read" lists. That said, if you're looking for any suggestions on what to read just on this list, I'd go with Autobiography of Malcolm X (which was strangely fascinating), definitely "A Supposedly…" by David Foster Wallace, the Joan Didion, The Double Helix (Watson is a total trip), and The American Way of Death. I'd agree with Jenclair that "Working" is good too. Oh, and DEFINITELY Hiroshima, it's unbelievable.

  4. unrulyreader20

    Citizen — "Meh" is a good response. I like it!

    Yeah, I feel like there are a few books there that I might actually tackle one fine day, but others just leave me cold. That "Ideas" section of the list fills me with a particular feeling of dread…

    Since tales of complete devastation are something I actually read, I've added "Hiroshima" to my TBR. Thanks for the recommendation.

  5. Bybee

    I thought the biography section was a little skimpy. Ditto the sports section. I've always wanted to read those two books, though. The ideas section left me a little cold. Haven't stopped to count up what I've read. Yay, more for the wishlist!

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