Worst liberal/left wing book that you forced to read in High School or College?

My Squash ^ | 10/31/02 | Burkeman1

[Burkeman1]

Everyone has their horror story about some PC or Left Wing book they were forced to read in High School or College. My worst book was in High School. It was "The Fixer" by Bernard Malamud. It was the tale of a Russian Jew being falsley accused of the rape and murder of a Christian Russian girl just before the Communist coup of Russia. He was innocent of the crime and the book details his time in prison and the torments he was subjucted too. OF Course during his time in prison he becomes a Marxist and hopes for revolution! The entire book was one giant communist propaganda piece. Since I had already read Solzenitsyn by that time and questioned the book in class I was told to shut up by the teacher. I did- to my shame- and got my "A".

What is the worst piece of Left wing crap that you were forced to read in school?

[wardaddy]

BUMP...lol....I agree.

[Welsh Rabbit]

At he didn't make you watch The Deer Hunter...

[Zon]

Ancient Greece politician Pericles is the second most quoted Greek by lawyers. Guess who the first is? Plato. What Aristotle is to Ayn Rand, Pericles is to Bill Clinton.

[Burkeman1]

This would be way out of line for any American High School- but the book "Stalingrad" by Antony Beevor details duty and honor on both the Russian and German side even though both armies were ruled by totalitarian pyscopaths. IN fact - what struck me most from that book was how both sides showed acts of true bravery even though the states that backed them couldn't care less if they lived or died.

[general_re]

There were several to choose from, but I heartily hated Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.

[nopardons]

What's PC / lefty about " The Lottery " ? I read that, on my own, when I was quite little and liked it. I remembered it so fondly, that I reread it, when I was in high school. Shirley Jackson wrote some cutting edge stories and that's one of the best. Perhaps you don't like physcological horror stories.

[fatguy]

"The Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison. Absolute garbage!

In the "Great Books" major at Notre Dame, a book had to pass the test of time by being at least 100 years old before it could be included on the core syllabus.

They dropped this rule because there were so few minority and women authors. "The Invisible Man" was added since Ellison is black.

[ImaGraftedBranch]

I don't know about which book was the worst, but I had a sociology professor (Kent State) that started out showing a movie called "Men's Rights." Hmmmm....couldn't be too bad...I thought. Then, it started delving into homosexuality, and how it was "ok" for men to kiss in public, and how men should not be afraid to hold hands.

I freaked out and left, dropped out and joined the Air Force. Best decision of my life. That was the ultimate "fork in the road," and it was a great choice.

[Burkeman1]

Howard Zinn is a Choumsky wanna be- and that is like comparing Beria to Stalin. Pathetic. Zinn is despicable.

[laurav]

Ok, Howard Zinn should NEVER be required as a primary text for studying American history, but it will probably keep the kids' interest as a supplement (most textbooks are so dreadfully dull anyway, and Zinn is at least lively). I read it and remained uncorrupted. He simply sees history as, to borrow words from Marx, a series of class struggles. Which makes him a good starting point for discussion: Why haven't the revolutions he keeps saying are on the cusp of happening, come about? He completely forgets the rise of the shareholder class, the upward mobility of minorities and immigrants, and that it's been conservative ideas that have been winning.

[FITZ]

I had to read Erlichs "The Population Bomb" which I believed was very liberal but now we're seeing millions of people flooding over our borders and boatloads of hundreds of hungry destitute people pouring onto our shores and I wonder if there wasn't a lot of truth in it. Really I believe it's their unwillingness to change their corrupt governments but a part of me wonders if there really is a population bomb going off.

[wardaddy]

I graduated Ole Miss in 1980....no modern liberal books used....plenty of classical liberal works such as Plato's Republic and some of the Enlightenment dead white guys.

Hobbe's Leviathan was way way ahead of the crowd for me.


Wait...I forgot...we did read some Eric Fromm and Kant and Camus...does that count? I was a Poli Sci major.

[VOA]

The Grapes of Wrath, but I didn't know it until much later.

While there is definitely a socialist sentiment, I still admire the book.

And hearing my grandparents and parents recount how they just barely managed to hang on
in north-central Oklahoma during the Depression, I guess I admired the work
because it portrayed how some average humans respond to a miserable situation with many
aspects simply beyond their own control.

And remembering that fifty percent of the population of Oklahoma left the state during the
Dust Bowl/Depression simply underlines how miserable the situation really was in Oklahoma;
the book also shows how miserable things were once the Okies arrived at the California
border.

I'm not saying the book isn't socialistic in tone. But I guess having heard how tough
the times really were, I look at it as a testament to a generation that mostly managed
to pull together and hold on.
Until Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Tojo accidentally stimulated the
economy and indirectly provoked the US Gov. to provide a cot, three squares
and a little money to send home (e.g., Audy Murphy's story) for millions of Americans.

[fatguy]

I guess that would be "THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO" by CARL MARX and FRIEDRICH ENGLES.

This made the cut in Notre Dame's Great Books Major because it was at least 100 years old and it was still thought of as "valuable".

[nopardons]

I'm too old to have been made to read a " PC " book ; however, " BRAVE NEW WORLD ", by Aldous Huxley ( summer required reading in boarding school ) fits the bill. My mother told me, when I was reading it, that Huxley was ( he was still alive, so you know how long ago this was ) a damned Socialist and that the book was Socialistic. :-)

" GRAPES OF WRATH " is so blatantly MARXIST , and not well written, that I couldn't allow that reply to stand, without my usual brusque comment, LOL

Any sign of the impending blessed event's possible early arrival ?

[SpencerRoane]

"I am studying history as my college major and one topic I like reading about is New England colonial history, especially the Puritans. I still get riled up about the complete and total nonsense that is peddled in that play. It is crap and does a major disservice to a people we should be admiring, despite that mistake."

What mistake?! Are you soft on witches? The last thing we need is another witch-symp at FreeRepublic.

[Billthedrill]

Sorry for the post and run...

No doubt Grapes of Wrath was a very fine novel, which is precisely why it took me so long to understand what I have come to regard as the profound intellectual swindle that was going on. I, too, would recommend it be read if only as a masterpiece of composition.

It will take too long for this venue to explain why I ended up feeling like I'd been manipulated by Steinbeck, but briefly here it is: the actual events surrounding the Dust Bowl involved a sense of community and sacrifice, and perhaps even heroism, on the part of the community banks Steinbeck vilified, many of which went under with their communities and took bankers and farms with them through no fault of the personnel of either. The upshot of the novel (and the later movie) was an emphasis on greed on the part of a faceless, evil group referred to variously as "the banks" or "the owners" in the novel, personified unfairly and, I think, far too useful to demonize a generation of people in the economy whose sin was failure in the face of an irresistable environmental and economic force, not venality. It was also extremely exploitable for those who insisted that capitalism itself was a root evil, and has remained so.

I don't blame Steinbeck for the attitude, and I do applaud him for his articulation and his skill as a novelist. He deserved the Pulitzer and the later Nobel, this novel being largely responsible for the latter for reasons that I have always suspected revolved its utility to anti-capitalists. And maybe it's purely personal, but I've always blamed this novel for casting my own attitudes in a mold it took a decade to break. It was a very big book with big ideas, and it had a very big effect on me...which was how I interpreted the question, and why I gave that answer.

[Burkeman1]

"Brave New World" was and is a totally anti utopian and anti Left book. Huxeley posited in "Brave New World" what would be the "perfect society" if the Left ever had total control of all aspects of humainty. And the results were horrific.

[Conservababe]

Anything written by Margaret Mead.

[fatguy]

"The Good Earth" I thought that was a good book.

I did too when I read it in junior high . . .

I'm sorry I sounded so condescending. It's late and my mind is dull -- I didn't mean to give off airs. I just meant to say that I also thought "The Good Earth" was good, but now I'm suspicious of it.

I'm wondering if Pearl S. Buck can write a later book whose main theme is pro-abortion, and not have had any of her culture of death thinking seep into "A Good Earth". I don't know.