10 Books That Screwed Up the World

And 5 Others That Didn't Help

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

An education

I totally enjoyed this book! It is like a timeline of liberalism. Rarely do I go out and buy the written version after listening to the audio, but on this one I did.

Excellent..Should Be Required Reading

This excellent book by Benjamin Wiker should be given to every high school student in America. It gives an unflattering look at some books that have shaped our modern world. Granted many will be unhappy with Dr. Wiker's choices. After all he does give an honest view of several works that are sacred to the modern intellectual elite. After nearly two decades in higher education I understand the importance of this book.

The book is well written and the reader does a great job. I look forward to more audiobooks from this author.

Why we are so screwed up in this world.

This book lays a good (if incomplete) case for what has happened to us since the so-called enlightenment. It exposes the true effects of atheism on the human mind and it's consequences for society, by analyzing some noted works. I highly recommend it to all open minded people.

Great book with brutal honesty-if you can take it

As soon as I saw the other reviews that accused the book of religious fundamentalism, then I knew this book must be good. I was right! Once I started it, I didn't want to stop until I completed all of it.

Whether you don't like the "religious" connections in this book or not, you can't argue with the brutally honest evaluation of these terrible tomes. The author points out that each book's "religious system" is based on a faith in atheism. I think someone asked, "What's God got to do with it?" This book answers, "Everything! Witness these results." These are the types of books -- and their results -- that you can expect when God's existence is denied and something else is put in His place.

I found the author's reviews excellent and thorough, and his logic was sound. I was already acquainted with a few of these books, but the others were new. Glad I missed them. I also thought the narrator was well-chosen.

I'll definitely be listening to this one again.

Read it.

If you’re looking for a book that will quickly unpack the ideas of some of the most nefarious men and women that have ever walked the face of the earth, this is the book for you. Benjamin W’s perspicacious analysis is sure to leave you intellectually satisfied. Read it.