Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century (ISI)

About the List
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) published in its Intercollegiate Review publication for Fall 1999 an annotated list of the fifty worst and fifty best books of the 20th century according to the standards of the institute.

50 Worst

 * 1) Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
 * 2) Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? by Beatrice & Sidney Webb
 * 3) Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey, et.al.
 * 4) One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse
 * 5) Democracy and Education by John Dewey
 * 6) The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor W. Adorno, et.al.
 * 7) An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by Charles Beard
 * 8) Black Athena by Martin Bernal
 * 9) Our Bodies, Our Selves by Boston Women's Health Book Collective
 * 10) After the Cataclysm by Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman
 * 11) Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver
 * 12) The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich
 * 13) The Secular City by Harvey Cox
 * 14) The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly
 * 15) Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis
 * 16) Doing What Comes Naturally by Stanley Fish
 * 17) The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
 * 18) The Enlightenment: An Interpretation by Peter Gay
 * 19) Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman
 * 20) Recollections of a Life by Alger Hiss
 * 21) The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley
 * 22) The International Style by Philip Johnson & Henry Russell Hitchcock
 * 23) Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy
 * 24) The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes
 * 25) The Politics of Ecstacy by Timothy Leary
 * 26) Armies of the Night by Norman Mailer
 * 27) Only Words by Catharine MacKinnon
 * 28) The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
 * 29) The New Basis of Civilization by Simon N. Patten
 * 30) The Pentagon Papers as Published by the New York Times, Based on Investigative Reporting by Neil Sheehan
 * 31) The Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper
 * 32) Christianity and the Social Crisis by Walter Rauschenbusch
 * 33) A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
 * 34) Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed
 * 35) The Greening of America by Charles Reich
 * 36) The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich
 * 37) On Becoming a Person by Carl Rogers
 * 38) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty
 * 39) Do It! by Jerry Rubin
 * 40) Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell
 * 41) Woman and the New Race by Margaret Sanger
 * 42) The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell
 * 43) The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
 * 44) Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner
 * 45) Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag
 * 46) The Making of the English Working Class by E.P. Thompson
 * 47) The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich
 * 48) The Open Conspiracy by H.G. Wells
 * 49) The New Freedom by Woodrow Wilson
 * 50) The Autobiography of Malcom X by Malcom X (with the assistance of Alex Haley)

50 Best

 * 1) The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
 * 2) The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
 * 3) Witness by Whittaker Chambers
 * 4) Selected Essays, 1917-1932 by T.S. Eliot
 * 5) A Study of History by Arnold Toynbee
 * 6) The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
 * 7) Teacher in America by Jacques Barzun
 * 8) Samuel Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate
 * 9) Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks & Robert Penn Warren
 * 10) The Whig Interpretation of History by Herbert Butterfield
 * 11) Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
 * 12) The Second World War by Winston Churchill
 * 13) A History of Philosophy by Frederick Copleston, S.J.
 * 14) Religion and the Rise of Western Culture by Christopher Dawson
 * 15) The Stripping of the Altars by Eamon Duffy
 * 16) The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote
 * 17) R.E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman
 * 18) Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
 * 19) Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene Genovese
 * 20) The Constitution of Liberty by Frederick von Hayek
 * 21) Protestant, Catholic, Jew by Will Herberg
 * 22) The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
 * 23) Modern Times by Paul Johnson
 * 24) The Face of Battle by James Keegan
 * 25) The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk
 * 26) The Great Chain of Being by Arthur Lovejoy
 * 27) After Virtue by Alasdar MacIntyre
 * 28) Jefferson and His Time by Dumas Malone
 * 29) Prejudices by H.L. Mencken
 * 30) The Seven-Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
 * 31) The Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr
 * 32) The Quest for Community by Robert Nisbet
 * 33) The Habit of Being by Flannery O'Connor
 * 34) Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
 * 35) Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy
 * 36) The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
 * 37) The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Rieff
 * 38) Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography by George Santayana
 * 39) Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter
 * 40) Natural Right and History by Leo Strauss
 * 41) The Elements of Style by William Sturnk & E.B. White
 * 42) The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling
 * 43) The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner
 * 44) The New Science of Politics by Eric Voegelin
 * 45) Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington
 * 46) The Double Helix by James D. Watson
 * 47) Patriotic Gore by Edmund Wilson
 * 48) Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
 * 49) The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
 * 50) The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcom X (with the assistance of Alex Haley)

Source
"The Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century" The Intercollegiate Review (Fall 1999). [PDF]