82 Weekend Edition April 4-6, 2014

A CounterPunch Reading List

100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century (and Beyond) in English
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
As the clock clicked down on the arrival of the new millennium, Alex and I were bemused at the spate of 100 best of the century lists pouring forth from the New York
Times, the New Yorker, Salon, the Guardian and other liberal publications. The lists were predictable and not many of the entries remained on our groaning shelves. So
we decided to compile our own catalogue of the best books written in English and, later translated into English, during the 20
th
Century. We spent weeks whittling it
down to roughly 100 titles for each. These became reading lists for like-minded CounterPunchers and proved two of the most popular pieces wed ever run on the
website, even pricking the interest of many librarians who were forced to confront the gaps in their own collections.
Over the decade, those pages were up on the site they attracted well-over two million unique visitors. Then disaster struck. During the Great Transformation of the
CounterPunch website to a Word Press platform, those lists were mangled beyond recognition. I remember calling Alex and telling him to cautiously look at the
wreckage. He clicked on the page, gasped and even sniffled a bit. Its the burning of the Alexandria library all over again! he quipped. Neither of us had the energy
to recreate the lost pages.
Since then weve received many pleas to resurrect those lists, the most recent coming from an old pal of ours whose book had earned a spot in the top 100. Finally, I
relented. I spent the last couple of weeks reviewing the entries and some old email exchanges with Alex about books that we both admired, which had been published
in the intervening years. So we now present once again our 100 best non-fiction books published in English in the 20
th
century (with a few important additions), along
with the introduction we wrote for our book Serpents in the Garden. (The translated books will follow.)
Jeffrey St. Clair
Serpents in the Garden
We edit CounterPunch, the popular radical website and magazine. We have fun doing it and we spend a lot of time laughing, as we chat on the phone between Petrolia, in
Humboldt County, northern California, and Oregon City, Oregon, perched over the Clackamas River, a few hundred miles north across the Siskiyous, in a whole different
weather system.
In the Sixties and Seventies, respectively, we both read English at college, Cockburn at Oxford, St. Clair at American University. English is a discipline that says, or used to
say before the critical theorists seized power and put pleasure to the sword, that its okay to enjoy reading books and okay to put off more or less permanently what youre
going to do when you grow up: yet another definition of being a journalist or pamphleteer. We both like the blues and food and theres a lot about both in CounterPunch.
We both think that a big part of being radical in the best sense of the word is in enjoying, promoting, defending art and the spirit of freedom and pleasure and craft skills
embodied by the arts. By the quality of life, art and freedom that radicals commend, so will radicals prevail.
You want to know where we stand? A few years ago we asked ourselves, and some friends, what we would include in the hundred best non-fiction books in the original
English, published in the twentieth centurymore or less. The library wed send to other planets, or to George W. Bush (although we know Laura the Librarian is doing her
best) Then we asked ourselves and our friends about books in translation and music and films. But more of that later.
Culture, music, art, architecture and sex. In the sixties the right thought the left had the best drugs and the best sex. Now? Well, the left sort of won that battle. These
days the right knows its okay to have a good time and sneers at the left for staying at home to read up on theories of surplus value. But there are always subversive and
revolutionary perspectives to be enjoyed in the Garden of Eden. And in the battle to return to that delightful piece of real estate, there were heroes thus far unsung, many
of them writers. For every pleasure we enjoy, theres a martyr in our past who paid the price.
Now for that reading list, so you can get acquainted with us.
AC / JSC
April, 2004

Edward Abbey: Desert Solitaire: a Season in the Wilderness
Louis Adamic: Dynamite: A Century of Class Violence in America, 1830-1930.
Philip Agee: Inside the Company: CIA Diary
Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa & Murray Silverstein: A Pattern Language: Towns, Building and Construction
Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colored-Blindness
Jack Anderson: Confessions of a Muckraker: The Inside story of Life in Washington During the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson Years
Kenneth Anger: Hollywood Babylon
Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
David Arora: Mushrooms Demystified: A Guide to the Fleshy Fungi
James Baldwin: The Devil Finds Work
Reyner Banham: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies
Frank Bardacke: Trampling Out the Vintage: Cesar Chavez and the Two Souls of the United Farmworkers Union
John Berger: Ways of Seeing
Jack Black: You Cant Win
Robin Blackburn: The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
Joseph Borkin: The Crime and Punishment of IG Farben
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Jim Bouton: Ball Four
Richard Boyer & Herbert Morais: Labors Untold Story
Marshall Bradley, Fern Bradley & Barbara Ellis: The Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening
Harry Braverman Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degredation of Work in the Twentieth Century
David Brower: For the Earths Sake
Norman O. Brown: Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History
Robert Byron: The Road to Oxiana
Rachel Carson: Silent Spring
E. H. Carr: What is History?
Allan Chase: The Legacy of Malthus: the Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism
Samuel B. Charters: The Country Blues
Noam Chomsky: The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians
Andrew Cockburn: The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine
Claud Cockburn: I, Claud
William Cronon: Natures Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Elizabeth David: French Provincial Cooking
Alexandra David-Neel: My Journey to Lhasa
Vine DeLoria, Jr.: Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto
Angie Debo Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place
John Dower: War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War
E.R. Dodds: The Greeks and the Irrational
W.E.B. DuBois: The Souls of Black Folk
Havelock Ellis Studies in the Psychology of Sex
William Empson: Seven Types of Ambiguity
Encyclopedia Britannica: 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica
Shulamith Firestone: The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution
M.F.K. Fisher: How to Cook a Wolf
Henry Watson Fowler: A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
Roger Fry: Cezanne: A Study of His Development
Northrop Frye: An Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays
Alex Haley & Malcolm X: The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Myles Horton: The Long Haul: An Autobiography
Carole Gallagher: American Ground Zero: the Secret Nuclear War
Martha Gellhorn The Face of War
Dan Georgakas: Detroit: I Do Mind Dying
Paul Goodman: Growing Up Absurd: the Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
Stephen Jay Gould: The Mismeasure of Man
Robert Graves: The Greek Myths
Alice Hamilton: Exploring the Dangerous Trades
E.C.S. Handy & Elizabeth Handy: Native Planters in Old Hawaii: Their Life, Lore and Environment
Gerald Hanley: Warriors: Life and Death Among the Somalis
Jane E. Harrison: Themis: A Study in the Social Origins of Greek Religion
Anthony Heilbut: The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times
Seymour Hersh Kissinger: The Price of Power
George Leonard Herter & Berte Herter: Bull Cook: Authentic Recipes and Practices
Christopher Hill: The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution
William Hinton: Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village
Richard Holmes: Shelley: the Pursuit
Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society
Harold A. Innis: The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History
C.L.R. James: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint LOuverture and the San Domingo Revolution
Ernest Jones: The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
Leroi Jones: Blues People: Negro Music in White America
Alvin Josephy, Jr: The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest
Walter Karp: The Politics of War
Pauline Kael: For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies
Robin D.G. Kelley: Thelonious Monk: the Life and Times of an American Original
John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money
Alfred Kinsey, et al.: The Kinsey Report on Human Sexual Behavior
Gabriel Kolko: Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience
Andrew Kopkind: The Thirty Years War: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994
Frank Kofsky: Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Sucessful Campaign to Deceive the Nation
Richard Erodes and John Fire Lame Deer: Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions
R.D. Laing: The Divided Self: an Existential Study in Sanity and Madness
Christopher Lasch: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
D.H. Lawrence: Etruscan Places
Meridel Le Sueur: North Star Country
Peter Linebaugh: The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century
Albert Bates Lord: The Singer of Tales
Norman MacLean: A River Runs Through It
Fitzroy McLean: Eastern Approaches
Scott McCloud: Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art
Alfred McCoy: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
Carey McWilliams: Factories in the Fields: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California
Norman Mailer: Advertisements for Myself
Dave Marsh: Heart of Rock and Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made
Leo Marx: The Machine in the Garden
Peter Matthiessen: In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: A Selection
Henry Miller: The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
C. Wright Mills: Listen, Yankee: the Revolution in Cuba
Jessica Mitford: The American Way of Death
John Moody: The Masters of Capital: a Chronicle of Wall Street
Edwin Morse: Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings
Robert Motherwell: Dada Documents and Manifestoes
Lewis Mumford: Technics and Civilization
Paul Oliver: Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues
Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary
R.R. Palmer: Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution
Doug Peacock: Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness
Roger Tory Peterson: A Field Guide to the Birds of North America
Kim Philby: My Silent War
Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation: the Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
Ezra Pound: ABC of Reading
David H. Price: Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBIs Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists
Charles Ramsey & Harold Sleeper: Architectural Graphic Standards
John Richardson: A Life of Picasso
Bertrand Russell: Autobiography
Edward Said: Orientalism
G.E.M. de Ste. Croix: The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World
Ken Saro-Wiwa: A Month and a Day: a Detention Diary
Nancy Scheper-Hughes: Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
Robert Sherrill: The Gothic Politics of the Deep South
Lincoln Steffens: Shame of the Cities
Lawrence Stone: Sex, Family and Marriage in England: 1500 to 1800
Thomas Szasz: The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct
Ida Tarbell: The History of the Standard Oil Company
Keith Thomas: Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England
Bertha Thompson: Sister of the Road: An Autobiography of Box Car Bertha
E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class
Hunter S. Thompson: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
David Thomson: A Biographical Dictionary of Film
Douglas Valentine: The Phoenix Program
Helen Vendler: The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets
Gordon Wasson: Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality
Edmund Wilson: To the Finland Station: a Study in the Acting and Writing of History
Geoffrey Wolff: Black Sun: the Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby
Donald Worster Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West
Frances Yates: The Art of Memory
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