[PJ-Comix]

Where is How to Pick Up Chicks on this list? They even made a TV movie about this. What happened is that the author first went to a book publishing company and the feminist female editor there told him she found his book manuscript absolutely revolting. So the guy published the book himself and sold it off of magazine ads. It was a BIG hit.

[6ppc]

They left out "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes.

[nina0113]

I just finished Witness and was blown away by it - I can't believe I waited so long to read it, I've been meaning to get around to it for probably ten years. I've only read a few of the others on the list. I think my next will be Homage to Catalonia.

[Mike Darancette]

Where is Winston Churchill's "A History of the English Speaking Peoples"? I agree with the first choice, however.

[SunkenCiv]

bibliopath?

[stylecouncilor]

ping

[Physicist]

Bibliopath ping.

[Physicist]

92. Darwin's Black Box, Michael J. Behe

Gilder: "Overthrows Darwin at the end of the 20th century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning."

What an embarrassment. I'd replace this with The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas.

[bannie]

88. Henry James, Leon Edel

King: "All the James you want without having to read him."

James' writing is a different kind of art. (And--if memory serves--he hated America.)

[Military family member]

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus

Some of the greatest essays I've ever read. "The MYth of Sisyphus" is wonderful.

[dead]

Kinda funny that George Gilder snuck his own book, "Wealth & Poverty" onto the list. It is a great book though, he should have written the blurb about it.

Also, the list is missing The Black Book of Communism and Total Baseball.

[Cruising Speed]

#78 Silent Spring--yikes!! Replace with "How to Turn 80 Million Workers into Capitalists on Borrowed Money"--an excellent book on what we should be doing.

[ml1954]

#101 -- Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government -- P. J. O'Rourke

[jennyp]

Sheesh, Darwin's Black Box gets on somehow, yet Atlas Shrugged or Fountainhead doesn't make the cut. Ridiculous.

Actually, if you're going for simply the most influential books, Morris & Whitcomb's The Genesis Flood did for young-earth creationism what Silent Spring did for envirowhakoism. Darwin's Black Box is a sideshow by comparison.

[Billthedrill]

Good heavens - I own all of the top 50. Scary.

I am pleased to see Witness that high in the list. It is one of the most stunning books I've ever read. I am even more pleased to see Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus there but it doesn't really belong - it is very, very difficult and indecipherable in a bad translation. But if all you take away is the first line - "The world consists not of things, but of facts," you will blow away most of the Marxian crap that so infested the 20th century and all of the ridiculous postmodern puppet show that has pretended to replace philosophy with nihilism.

Very, very pleased to see Paul Johnson included. Orwell's Homage to Catalonia was the break of a brilliant mind from obscurantist garbage by way of a real war. Eggs aren't broken to make Lenin's omelet, people are. What else? Wolfe gets a double portion and it's deserved. Keegan is there. Churchill, of course.

A couple of modest suggestions - Human Action by Ludwig von Mises and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. And maybe History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell.

I didn't see Naughty Nurses In Bondage but dang it, that's a classic too...

[Mr. Silverback]

40. The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama

What in the bloody world is anything by this lying, brain donor clown doing on this list?

Bump for later reading.

[Mr. Silverback]

There's a book that isn't on the list, but should be. It is obscure, but its impact was beginning to be known in the last years of the century (it's the reason the Gulf War ground campaign was three days long) and will be huge in this century.

The book is "On Winning and Losing," by John Boyd.