10 Books That Screwed Up the World

And 5 Others That Didn't Help

By: Benjamin Wiker

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 6 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

You've heard of the "Great Books"? These are their evil opposites.

From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors' bad ideas are still popular and pervasive; in fact, they might influence your own thinking without your realizing it.

Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker. In this scintillating new book, he seizes each of these evil books by its malignant heart and exposes it to the light of day. You'll learn:

Why Machiavelli's The Prince was the inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand)

How Descartes's Discourse on Method "proved" God's existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego

How Hobbes's Leviathan led to the belief that we have a "right" to whatever we want

Why Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto could win the award for the most malicious book ever written

How Darwin's Descent of Man proves he intended "survival of the fittest" to be applied to human society

How Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil issued the call for a world ruled solely by the "will to power"

How Hitler's Mein Kampf was a kind of "spiritualized Darwinism" that accounts for his genocidal anti-Semitism

How the pansexual paradise described in Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be a creation of her own sexual confusions and aspirations

Why Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was simply autobiography masquerading as science

Witty, shocking, and instructive, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World offers a quick education on the worst ideas in human history and how we can avoid them in the future.

©2008 Benjamin Wiker (P)2008 Tantor

I had been wondering how it got screwed up

Would you consider the audio edition of 10 Books That Screwed Up the World to be better than the print version?

I've never purchased or read the print version.

Who was your favorite character and why?

This question is irrelevant this type of book.

A thoughtful analysis

Excellent and intelligent overview of complex ideas. Explains how we stumbled into our present confusing world. Well worth your time.

A thought provoking analysis of the harm done by famous books

Dr. Wiker provides an erudite and highbrow verbal skewering of some famous authors from the past six centuries. The analysis is thought provoking and leads the reader not only to contemplate the ideas introduced in each book, but the negative repercussions of these literary works. It is a reminder to us all of the need to be a discriminating reader of information and to be aware of the ideas we take in from whatever source.

Rambling and arrogant

If you’re into Christianity you’ll love it. If you can think for yourself save your money.

Hard to get past the author's misguided premise

Two starts because the author is clearly up on the subject matter he is writing about.

Missing the other three because, well, I just can't get past the author's apparent assertion that one cannot be a moral person without religion. I find this somewhat amusing given some of the things done in the name of religion, but this isn't the place to go into that. Also, he's of the mind that a viewpoint cannot be valid unless it embraces some form of God as one of its major tenants.

I agree with one of the other reviewers here - brand this clearly as religious content so that one knows what they are spending their credits on.

Needs a label

Great title, but a very tiresome listen. This audio needs a clearer stamp describing what it is - a conservative religious swing at the "evils" of godlessness, abortion, homosexuality and women's liberation.

Beware: Pro-Christian Polemics

Darn! This book had such a good title I didn't check the reviews. It turns out to be simply Christian polemics --- not even C.S. Lewis' cool Christian apologetics, but actual polemics using words like "evil" to describe writers such as Descartes, which would surely have surprised him and many others. I say polemics because, mysteriously, abortion keeps coming up --- and that topic appears nowhere in any of the books. It's just something the author wants to rant about.

I assumed the books chosen screwed up the world from a humanist secular point of view, but no, it's mostly a series of accusations that the writers are all Sceptics, unbelievers, and he says this like it's a bad thing. For instance, I once actually read Descartes' famous Cogito, ergo sum, and was aghast to find that the three first chapters are desperate claims that of course he doesn't mean God -- that God obviously exists, no problem that needs excommunication or book-banning or burning at the stake there. Descartes did write at a time when free-thinking of any kind tended to get in trouble with church authorities. Wiker leaps over those chapters and disregards them, repeatedly landing in Chapter 4 to denounce Descartes's "I think therefore I am" as somehow an atheistic claim. I didn't really follow that argument.

There is some interesting logic that I enjoyed. For instance, with Machiavelli's claim that the end justifies the means, the author alters a common thought experiment to say that suppose a terrorist had a bomb and said he would blow up New York if you didn't kill and skin your grandmother. I had to work out why Wiker didn't use the version found on ten thousand Internet forums, that the terrorist would blow up New York unless you tortured him into telling where the bomb is. I suppose he preferred to avoid the torture reference since the church Inquisition did so very much torturing itself. My personal solution to the torture (or grandmother) thought experiment is 1. Nothing like that ever happens, don't be silly, and 2. the answer to all these thought experiments is to do what is right in this moment and don't make predictions about the future, since we can't know the future. C.S. Lewis said that. But this author said if right and wrong have collapsed to the point that you have to skin your grandmother (or torture people, I would say) to save New York, why bother with New York? Good answer to that puzzle, assuming it's worth an answer.

This book is presented under false pretenses and is a scam, so I recommend people stay away from it unless Christian polemics is what they like.

Anything but unbiased

I can save you s credit by summarizing the book in one sentence. "These philosophers are wrong because they're atheists. "
Now you know what the author had to say about all these books you can spend your credit on something that might be intellectually unbiased.

Egotistical Rant By A Very Poor Academic

I feel like I've been hoodwinked into buying this book! It is not a proper critique on the books in question at all. It is just a Fundamentalist Christian diatribe on why we should ignore anything that an atheist tells us.

Hard to get past the author's misguided premise

Two starts because the author is clearly up on the subject matter he is writing about.

Missing the other three because, well, I just can't get past the author's apparent assertion that one cannot be a moral person without religion. I find this somewhat amusing given some of the things done in the name of religion, but this isn't the place to go into that. Also, he's of the mind that a viewpoint cannot be valid unless it embraces some form of God as one of its major tenants.

I agree with one of the other reviewers here - brand this clearly as religious content so that one knows what they are spending their credits on.