[zook]

Herbert Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man." This was nearly 30 years ago and it fascinated and confused me at the time. But I soon realized how full of tripe it was with all this "false consciousness, no one can really know anything," stuff. As I recall, the professor was actually trying to lure us to be critical, but lefties mostly dominated the class.

[Billthedrill]

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

[Lunatic Fringe]

"The Good Earth"

[Senator Pardek]

Silent Spring (hint - book titles should be underlined).

[Live free or die]

I was forced to read a book called Zenzele which sang the praises of the new Zimbabwe after ZANU-PF took over. Naturally plenty of white racism is portrayed, but the author failed to mention AIDS or land seizures or anything else.

A rough quote from the book: "I was a slave in Rhodesia. In Zimbabwe I could really live."

What's worse is that the author of the book came to my university only a few months after Sept 11 and had the unmitigated gall to tell us that we didn't understand true terrorism. That white racism was far worse than anything the Arabs had ever done to us. I'm sure there are other PsOS I've read that might be worse, but I'm still in college and it's probably going to get worse before it gets better.

[manfromlamancha]

I was listening to Charles Osgood and Jim Bohanen and decided that they must have studied from the same book in college: "How To Sound Like A Man While Being Screwed Up The B@#t" That has to be the worst lib book

[The Shrew]

I went to a small Lutheran school and the book that stands out in my mind is The Bridge at Andau?

It is the only non-fiction book James Mitchener ever wrote. He was in Austria researching one of his books in October of 1956. He went to Andau on the Austrian/Hungarian border and interviewed refugees of the Russian onslaught of Budapest to quell the Hungarian Revolution. It is a fascinating book. It would be very difficult to be a Marxist having read this book - well it worked on me anyway!

Sorry this doesn't fit your criteria but the book is well read and still on my shelf.

Regards,

TS

[struggle]

I hate to say it, but Platos Republic. So many students have focused on the illogical Plato instead of the Greek-era Renaissance man Aristotle. Plato's Republic was a nice fantasy, but it has no logical proof in the real world.

[ovrtaxt]

What's the sci-fi book about an environmental doomsday? The ice caps melt, processed foods start causing spontaneous combustion during digestion, an airplane impales a building in NYC (!), basically, the world ends because nobody believes the envirowhacks.

Just can't remember the name of the book!

[Welsh Rabbit]

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I recently read a very good article by John McWhorter where he systematically examines the inconsistencies and outright lies that are abundant in Maya Angelou's literature.

[Krafty123]

I am not sure if it is left-wing, but the worst book I had to read for school was A Tale of 2 Cities. Wuthering Heights was also pretty poor.

[Sally II]

Gosh, that's a great question. I can't wait to see how other people respond. I can't think of anything that was too horrible. In junior college I took an easy summer class in ecology. One day we had to read a leftist article that blasted the rich western countries for polluting the earth, and we were asked to write an essay on the article. Since I had been to a few third world countries and the college was located in an area that was heavily populated by welfare recipients, I argued that poor people and poor countries polluted the most --welfare people couldn't afford decent running cars, so they always had several junky cars parked around their dried up lawns. Poor countries couldn't afford the environmental laws that would cut emissions. I got an A in that class.

In university, the worst class was probably modern American history. We had to read Backfire,a book that blames American puritanism, in part, for the Vietnam war, and I also had to suffer through a Bill Moyers special that was highly critical of Ronald Reagan.

[beckett]

I wasn't forced to read it --- IOW it wasn't part of any curriculum --- but as a teen I read The Greening of America, and entered for a time into the looking glass world of Charles Reich. Also, I look back on Future Shock as a particularly bad piece of business, a totalist vision composed of lots of silly guesses and fantasy.

[Question_Assumptions]

Amazingly, one of my high school English teachers was a young, anti-drug fairly conservative Jewish guy who was into science fiction.

Of course my high school also showed the students Roman Polanski's MacBeth. The one funded by Playboy. The parental consent forms for the "R" rated movie mentioned "some violence". Of course the forms totally failed to mention the nude witches, the nude Lady MacBeth, and the maid getting raped on the hallway. This was in the early 1980s.

The real nutcase was the Psychology teacher. She thought that parents arranging for their young teenage daughters to lose their virginity with older guys was a great idea.

This is, of course, part of why I'm so interested in home schooling and/or private religious schools as an alternative to public schools.

[habs4ever]

It's mostly a fog now, but one comes back to me and that's Nevile Shute's On The Beach.I liked the movie so much more.

[VetoBill]

I am torn about this book, "Johnny Got his Gun"

Great because it goes past the glory often presented in wars and shows the grim horrors involved. Poor because it is often a tool of the leftists and pacifists and can lead one into their mindset.

I was forced to read this during a college history class, for what reason I still don't know... I believe it would fit better in a literature class.

[chnsmok]

I graduated in 1965 in a small Nebraska town. No leftist stuff there (that I was aware of).

[Joe Bonforte]

Economics and the Public Purpose by John Kenneth Galbraith. But the professor (the only non-Keynesian, non-Marxist on the faculty) pulled a fast one on the rest of the economics faculty. He had to make us read the Galbraith book, so he also added Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom as the counterpoint.

[grumpster-dumpster]

1974- "Contemporary English" (Required for my major):

The title: "Noam Chomsky(sp?) (And a subtitle I can't remember)"

Reading this particular ditty was worth 50 points towards the final grade...
Since the basic premise of "Contemporary English" was NO more nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, etc... Just noun phrases and verb phrases that the student was required to diagram...AND since I had no chance to get out of the class with better than a "D" anyway... I only read the first page.

I'm sorry, I just didn't see the need to study the life of a guy who liked to diagram sentances. Since he turn out to be a full-fledged commie and noted wack-o, I don't feel I missed anything.

P.S.: Still got a "D" ...and was actually grateful for that inflated grade! :o)

[Sally II]

Okay, now I remember a real duzy: Dharma Bums Jack Kerouac. I had that for a "Literature of the Wilderness" class. It was so stupid. It had nothing to do with the wilderness, and everything to do with over-spiritualizing selfish, hedonistic impulses. I followed that by trying to read Peter Matthiessen's At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Snow Leopard --which was all the same sort of stuff: psychodelic drugs, buddhism, idealization of primitive cultures, and stereotyping and belittling Christians.