Harm?

[bcholmes]

Someone at work sent me a list of the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. As defined by 15 conservative scholars, that is.

Check out these totally unbiased comments:

The [Kinsey] reports were designed to give a scientific gloss to the normalization of promiscuity and deviancy.

And:

In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking "skills" instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education -- particularly in public schools -- and helped nurture the Clinton generation.

And:

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in "a comfortable concentration camp" -- a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism.

Runner-ups include Unsafe at Any Speed and Origin of the Species.

Comments

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

'scholars'. Sheesh.

Oh no, these whiners can't stand contradictory views.

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

oh goodie! i now have a great reading list! anyone who hates Darwin is going to pick all books that i'd love to read. :)

n.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Actually, it shows the limitations of "my enemy's enemy"--Mein Kampf, for instance.

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

ooo! good point. forgot about that one :)

*blush*

n.

[blueinva.livejournal.com]

Another of my friends posted this and one of the comments pointed out that 14 of the 15 judges are men, and the lone female is Phyllis Schlafley. I'm kind of surprised given the slant of the books that The Female Eunuch and Atlas Shrugged weren't on the list.

[nex0s.livejournal.com]

Atlas Shrugged is like these guys manifesto.

the Female Eunuch i agree with. but maybe they felt that the Feminine Mystique covered it.

n.

[blueinva.livejournal.com]

Really? I would have thought that defining your own personal freedoms would be an anaethema to these guys. *Plus* It requires you to think, not a skill-set particularly valued by ditto-heads.

[cigfrain.livejournal.com]

ayn rand is usually held to by these people as a manifesto for hard-core laissez-faire economics and the utter rejection of any kind of communal consciousness.

which is, of course, at odds with their own authoritarian idealism, but that tends to get a heavy gloss.

[blueinva.livejournal.com]

Of course *slaps forehead* Take the original meaning, twist it, season to taste et voila!

Reading Freakonomics by Steven Levitt, and if the book picks up enough sales I'm certain it'd make their list for making horrible assertions such as Rowe v Wade helped bring down the level of violent crime in the US...

CREEPY

[fightingtiger.livejournal.com]

It was a pleasure meeting you BC!

I think there's a conspiracy to keep me from seeing this list as my browser crashes every time I click on it. Still, the Kinsey report, they malinged my beloved Kinsey report... ;-)

Got it finally

[fightingtiger.livejournal.com]

My computer was resisting heavily "No, please don't make me go to the icky website..."

Ahem...

John Stuart Mill... [smacks forehead] They put John Stuart Mill on it...

Nice wake up call, BC. I forget these people exist (although admittedly that happens less and less...)

[professor-booty.livejournal.com]

Behold - the Literary Axis of Evil! Time for a good ole' book burning....the US reserves the right to destroy these terrorist works before they can strike again!

Asleep at the Switch...!

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

Hey, where's Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock? ;-)

Oh goodie, a reading list

[svartormr.livejournal.com]

Nice of them to spend the time to put it together. :)