10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 260 pages
• Published by: Regnery Publishing May 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1596980559
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1596980556
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 1 pounds

Product Description
From Machiavelli to Marx, Nietzsche to Hitler, this volume offers a provocative look at some of Western civilization's most infamous authors and their literary works and shows how these works have inflicted great evil in the world---and still cause suffering. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

From the Inside Flap
You've heard of the "Great Books"?

These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's The 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' terrible 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 his scintillating new book, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World (And 5 Others That Didn't Help), he seizes each of these evil books by its malignant heart and exposes it to the light of day. In this witty, learned, and provocative exposé, 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' Discourse on Method "proved" God's existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego
* How Hobbes' 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 The 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.

Reader Reviews
Disturbing, witty, insightful, enlightened, often humorous and certainly worthwhile. Benjamin Wiker's "10 Books that Screwed up the world, and 5 others that didn't help", is not just a book on Philosophy, Theology or social comminatory. Dr Wiker is detailing the slippery slope our culture has been trotting down for the last four hundred plus years. Some of what I liked about this book is the thoroughness with which Machiavelli, Descartes ET el., and their works are covered. I also like the additional background, Dr. Wiker offers to help to frame and flesh out the authors and the works discussed. The aforementioned background I found immensely useful in my attempt to understand where the likes of Machiavelli, Descartes, and Hobbes were coming from; and equally as important in understanding how Engels and Darwin provided a faulty foundation for Hitler, Freud and others to follow. I believe the author has done the hard reading and research necessary to provide even handed diagnosis of the books, theories, politics and political philosophy under discussion. He does an excellent job of tying together the domino effect of one bad idea built upon a previous bad idea. His book is impressively researched and thoughtfully laid out. Ben Wiker states on page 191"The desire that something be true, rather than the desire for truth itself, may well be the root of all evil. It is certainly the origin of all ideology, and ideology was the source of much of the evil in the past century." I found this quote summarized many of the findings of this book. Throughout this book, it is apparent the authors discussed looked to themselves as the source of truth, rather than seeking guidance from another source; God. Well worth the read! This book is a quick and easy read. The author presents his ideas in a witty conversational manor I have a background in Sociology and have taught Sociological theory on the college level. If and when I return to the college classroom I will use this very readable and easily understandable book as one of my required texts. Read this book before it is banned on college campuses, buried and burned by the media.