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| 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help | 
 enlarge | Author: Benjamin Wiker
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $16.14
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New (29) Used (9) Collectible (1) from $16.14
Avg. Customer Rating:  42 reviews
Sales Rank: 11358
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 260
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6 x 1.1
ISBN: 1596980559
Dewey Decimal Number: 909.09821
EAN: 9781596980556
ASIN: 1596980559
Publication Date: May 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: A20081204200535W
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| Customer Reviews:
 Intellectually Dishonest Christian Propaganda August 11, 2008
38 out of 63 found this review helpful
It is a sad commentary on our times that a book like this can be written, let alone shown respect. Wiker insults some of the greatest minds in Western Civilization (e,g, Hobbes, Descartes, Darwin, Freud, Rousseau). It is clear that Wiker regards any school of thought undermining the Medieval concept of God and Society as anathema. He longs for the good old days. He clearly hates the Enlightenment and modern materialist science. Too bad Wiker lives in the 21st century instead of the 12th. He would be more at home there.
His lies and slanders are too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say that this is yet another right-wing Catholic broadside against the emancipation of women (hence his attacks on Sanger and Friedan), against the separation of secular power from ecclesiastical control (hence his attacks on Machiavelli and Hobbes), against modern science (hence his attacks against Darwin), and against the emancipation of human sexuality from the cesspool of superstion, guilt and repression (hence his attacks on Freud and Kinsey). And notice how he impugns these great thinkers b linking them with Hitler, an anti-Semite who was spawned by the Austrian Catholic Church. Wiker is appalled by the modern world. I wonder what he thinks of Founders such as Paine, Jefferson, Franklin and Madison! After all, they revered John Locke, whom Wiker despises.
It's Regnery, after all May 16, 2008
37 out of 150 found this review helpful
Can you imagine a right-wing hack writing a book about which other books were most dangerous?
Considering the fact that George Bush considers the Bible the most important and influential book in his life, we might want to add that one to the list.
When I was at the harold washington library in downtown Chicago last week, I pulled this one off the shelf and sat down at one of the tables up on the 4th floor to see what it was about. Big surprise: it's about nothing.
If you part with your hard-earned cash for this, you may be disappointed, because you'll know the whole story after the first 6 pages, and even if you're dim enough to continue after that, you'll end up finishing the book in about an hour and a half (unless you are either Glenn Reynolds or one of the 23% of Americans who still supports the Bush Administration- then it might take a good bit longer).
Seriously, if you're looking for a good Right-Wing read, I'd look elsewhere. Just the fact that this guy is willing to give books the label of "dangerous" should tell you the whole story. That, and the fact that it's on Regnery, which is a right-wing publisher well-known for overshipping their books in order to get on a best seller list, only to have to eat them when they are nearly all returned after gathering dust on book shelves. Regnery is part of the wing-nut welfare system, which keeps a steady stream of this low-quality stuff coming all the time. Most of their writers couldn't get published by any respectable publishing house.
Anyway, regarding the author's notion that there are certain books (like Origin of Species-hint hint) that are "dangerous": to paraphrase the NRA. Books don't kill - people do. The only ideas which are "dangerous" are the little pseudo-ideas clinking around the empty heads of wingnut academics like this turkey.
Save your money for buying gas. By the time Bush is out of office, it's going to be at least 5 bucks a gallon.
 Well-Written Bollocks May 25, 2008
37 out of 59 found this review helpful
It is deeply saddening to me that the political movement to which I belong has grown so accustomed to producing such tripe in the place of sound critiques of liberalism. Russell Kirk, Bill Buckley and Frank Meyer are turning over in their graves, as is the great libertarian HL Mencken, whom the Discovery Institute (whence this book comes) has recently begun decrying as an elitist and a fascist simply because he stands as one of the most courageous critics of the populist snake-oil they recycle from the mouth of William Jennings Bryan on a daily basis. This book is one particularly noxious example of such snake oil.
To be fair to the author, Mr. Benjamin Wiker, the trouble with this book is not its selection of works (most of them did, to put it mildly, screw up the world). However, Mr. Wiker's reasoning supporting these selections is often simplistic, anti-intellectual and totally barren. Worse yet, when Mr. Wiker goes wrong, he goes wrong in much the same way the Hindenburg went wrong - his pages of misguided and barren analysis explode into a conflagration of disaster. I shall devote the remainder of this review to those colossal mistakes.
The inclusion of Hitler, Marx, Lenin, Sanger, Mead, Freud, Kinsey, Rousseau and Friedan are all eminently appropriate, even if Mr. Wiker's critiques of them are highly sloppy. However, he betrays his ties to the misnamed "Discovery Institute" by his inclusion of Darwin, Mill, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Descartes. I suppose Mr. Wiker's employers would refuse to pay him if he didn't slip in the obligatory slander of Darwin as an inspiration for Hitler. However, in making this critique, Mr. Wiker merely displays the worst trait which the great Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek attributed to conservatives: the refusal to accept scientific advancements because of their unintended moral implications. Science, properly speaking, is amoral, and only becomes dangerous when people attempt to use it as a justification for political action. Plugging one's ears and humming in the face of evolution is not the solution - in fact, as the great conservative author Larry Arnhart points out, Darwinism can be reconciled with conservatism, and attempts to do so are the solution in this case. The critique of Machiavelli is similarly absurd - Machiavelli was providing politicians political know-how which could be used to advance any agenda. Just because a guns is used to murder someone, that does not mean we ban guns, no matter what Nancy Pelosi might want. The same goes for political theory.
The inclusion of Mill, meanwhile, is pure ignorance. If Wiker wanted to attack the utilitarians, he ought to have attacked Bentham, of whom Mill is a poor clone. Frank Meyer, one of the leading lights of the early National Review, even defended Mill as a valid intellectual force, and while his arguments in "utilitarianism" may be shoddy, to place him in the same company as Hitler and Stalin is sheer alarmism. Mill's utilitarianism provided a justification to some of the greatest libertarian economists, as well as for misguided liberals, and to call him a monster like Hitler is to ignore that vital contribution.
However, the most tragic and utterly offensive inclusions are those of Hobbes and Descartes. Hobbes, the founder of negative liberty, ought to be cheered by conservatives as a man who understood both the imperfection of man and the necessity for certain freedoms to be beyond the Government's control. The critique of Descartes, meanwhile, as someone who makes God subservient to the ego, should have gone out of fashion with the Spanish Inquisition. Reason is the one thing God gave man that separates man from beast, and to suggest that coming to understand God through reason is somehow inferior to understanding God through blind acceptance is to insult Malcolm Muggeridge, Blaise Pascal and countless other great thinkers who came to God through reason and remained his most ardent defenders as a result. Mr. Wiker would do well to learn from them.
10 Books That Threaten Christians: And 5 Others That Just Piss Them Off June 7, 2008
37 out of 62 found this review helpful
That should have been the title of this book. I skimmed this book for about half an hour in the bookstore but it only took the perusal of a few pages to realize that this was just another reactionary Christian response to the new wave of Atheism books. The author should be ashamed for not making his agenda more clear with the title. Perhaps it was skillfully chosen so that he could find an audience with me instead of the choir in the Christian section. I feel duped.
The agenda and lack of objectivity couldn't have been made more clear when the author references Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris as pussycat atheists in comparison to Nietzche. This attack on such a modern group of authors quickly betrays the seriousness implied by the title. (By the way I'd love to see this guy engage in a debate with Mr. Hitchens. Hitch would be picking Mr. Wiker out of his teeth after about five minutes).
The argument threaded through the pages of this book is clear. The world could be good if we all believed there was a singular objective judge of morality. Otherwise everything is permitted.
The blame starts in 1513 with Machiavelli and ends in the present era with Betty Friedan. Is the world really less moral and therefore worse off since 1500 because of these books? I don't think so. A quick review of history will reveal countless atrocities committed before the sixteenth century that were just as if not more "evil" than the French Revolution or the Holocaust. The scale may be smaller but that's only a function of state size and technological capability.
Lack of belief in a supreme being may cause you to question what's moral and what isn't more than you would otherwise but this is most certainly a good thing. I shudder to think what the world would be like if morality had been passed down from Moses or King David without modification. Even if there are a few rogue individuals who use atheism to come to the personal conclusion that everything is permitted, this does nothing to prove the existence of God.
If theologians were able to go back in time and commit infanticide against the authors of these books old testament style, it cannot be denied that similar books would have likely been published. The ideas expressed in these books were less likely born in their authors than they were synthesized and articulated from epochal thought. If you can agree with me on that point then where can we point the finger?
Cluelessness on stilts May 16, 2008
36 out of 143 found this review helpful
I've read most of the books listed in Wiker's weird little volume, so I looked at his description of one that I know well, Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil." His caricature is predictable, but sad nonetheless.
And that goes for Descartes, Hobbes, Darwin, and most if not all of the "great books" lambasted in this gibberish.
Even a seeming shoo-in like Lenin raises the question, which book has harmed more people: Lenin's, or the Bible?
Worth perusing in the bookstore for laughs, but don't waste your money (or encourage this guy) by buying this book.
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