The 100 Best Non-Fiction Books

guardian.co.uk:

After keen debate at the Guardian's books desk, this is our list of the very best factual writing, organised by category, and then by date.

Read the whole story: guardian.co.uk

Comments

[Mum]

07:03 PM on 06/17/2011

Some worthy additions (although I could easily come up with 100 in addition and replace at least a third of the Guardian's list) : "The Denial of Death" - Ernest Becker; "Notes of a Native Son" - James Baldwin; "Analects" - Confucius; "In the American Grain" - William Carlos Williams; Upanishads; "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" - William Shirer; "The History of the Peloponnesian War" - Thucydides; "The Open Society and Its Enemies" - Carl Popper; "A Theory of Justice" - John Rawls; "Annals of the Former World" - John McPhee; "The Myth of the Machine" - Lewis Mumford; "The Snow Leopard" - Peter Matthiessen; "Tao Te Ching" - Lao Tzu; "The Waning of the Middle Ages" - Johan Huizinga; "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property" - Lewis Hyde; The Dhammapada; "Confessions" - St. Augustine; "Minima Moralia" - Theodor Adorno; "The Hidden Wound" - Wendell Berry-------------------I apologize for the clump of text. Apparently HP is still not allowing me to post lists.

[3fingerbrown]

09:08 AM on 06/16/2011

Johan Huizinga's "Autumn of the Middle Ages" deserves a place on the list.

Barbara Tuchman should be represented. My favorites are "The March of Folly" and "The Proud Tower."

The Twelve Caesars, by Suetonious, should definitely be on the list.

No books about sports or show business made the list. Suggestions?

[John Dav Redux]

10:10 PM on 06/16/2011

Most people that follow sports aren't well read, so that's probably why there aren't a lot of great books about them.

Tuchman is too pop to be on this list.

[tswift4evar]

05:53 PM on 06/15/2011

Now I might have missed one, but it seems to me that all of these books were written by Westerners. How surprising!

[John Dav Redux]

10:11 PM on 06/16/2011

I agree. Debbie Wu's "101 Ways to Cook Tofu" DEFINITELY belongs on this list!

[electricladyland]

12:27 PM on 06/15/2011

Very debatable choices. In the Mathematics category, I would replace Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid with A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy.

[John Dav Redux]

03:36 PM on 06/15/2011

Actually, most people wouldn't debate 2/3 of those books. As far as the Hofstadter, people actually still read him. No one reads Hardy anymore - not even the technical papers he wrote, and certainly not anything non-technical.

[electricladyland]

03:49 PM on 06/15/2011

You have no grounds for saying that most people wouldn't debate 2/3 of these books. Moreover, invoking "most people" is not a valid argument, given that "most people" are pretty ignorant. Hardy's book is a fascinating portrait of a mathematician and the aesthetic qualities of mathematics.