Out of curiosity, is this the Manchester Guardian?

I don't suppose it's surprising that a British journal would focus on sources about Britain, but I don't quite see why there are so many 'crime' books.

I'd tend to delete the crime books, and add Myths that Cause Crime; The Mismeasure of Man; The Nazi Doctors; Hiroshima-shi, Nagasaki-shi; Nehru's Letters to His Daughter; etc, etc.

Of course, ultimately, you can't limit significant books by any arbitrary metric. There will always be other candidates for deletion/addition.

Can somebody save me the trouble of figuring out which of the 101 books on this list is not one of THE GUARDIAN's top 100 non-fiction books?

CLAY SHIRKY, really.

Deleted, for not being on The Guardian's original list:

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Also: The entry by Susan Sontag shouldn't actually be Against Interpretation: And Other Essays, but CAMP ...

Thanks for the help.

No problem!

Awesome! Thanks for finding the 101st book, it was driving me crazy!

My pleasure. :)

Thanks for the list!

This is just pitiful. I have only read 3 of the "Top 100" ... looks like I have some serious reading to do.

"The Medium is the Massage" should actually be "The Medium is the Message". For me it is pitiful, too. I've read only 4 and 3 of those were because of assignments in high school or college.

No, it was meant to called 'The Medium is the Message', but there was a printing error and McLuhan liked it...
http://garydexter.blogspot.com/2009/0...

Several of these I read only because I was an English Lit. major in college. Do they count? Well, never mind -- I decided "read" is "read," no matter the reason.

Valerie wrote: "Out of curiosity, is this the Manchester Guardian?"

What used to be called the Manchester Guardian is now just called the Guardian, and is based in London.

The original manuscript of "The Diary of Anne Frank" was written in ballpoint (according to an article I read in the New York Times, back in the 1990s). To paraphrase the Mickey Rourke character from the (excellent) late 1980s film, Angel Heart, "They weren't too big on ballpoint back in '45."

Ergo, the inclusion of the "Diary," in a list of the "Top 100 NONFICTION Books," seems less than entirely warranted.

I think your argument is with the Guardian, not with us!

The manuscript(s) of Anne Frank's Diary has been repeatedly verified by graphologists and other experts.

Notwithstanding the repeated refutation of disingenous attempts to deny the validity of the document, however, there is still good reason to pick the critical edition as the edition to read, since the editors of said critical edition restored several elisions and deletions introduced by Otto Frank and other earlier publishers, and because parts of the diary were rewritten by Anne herself, with an eye toward publication; and people might prefer to see both the original version and the edited version.

What criteria did The Guardian use? The list includes The Communist Manifesto, but not The Wealth of Nations. Arguably, The Wealth of Nations was a more influential and important work.

Great

A superb list. My only addition? "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," by Hunter S. Thompson.

Valerie wrote: "Out of curiosity, is this the Manchester Guardian?

I don't suppose it's surprising that a British journal would focus on sources about Britain, but I don't quite see why there are so many 'crime' ..."

It hasn't been "Manchester" for about 40 years!

Just goes to show the hazards of relying on fiction over a hundred years old as one's primary gazetteer for foreign lands.

I've never actually seen a copy of the periodical in question, though I've seen articles from it, quoted in other sources or reprinted entire.

Where on earth is Hersey's Hiroshima?
Also Bitter Fruit by Stephen Kinzer and Adam Hochchild's King Leopold's Ghost.

Take it up with the Guardian (see comment 16, above) ...