10 Books That Screwed Up the World cover art

10 Books That Screwed Up the World

And 5 Others That Didn't Help

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10 Books That Screwed Up the World

By: Benjamin Wiker
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
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About this listen

 You've heard of the "Great Books"? These are their evil opposites.

From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors' bad ideas are still popular and pervasive; in fact, they might influence your own thinking without your realizing it.

Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker. In this scintillating new book, he seizes each of these evil books by its malignant heart and exposes it to the light of day. You'll learn:

  • Why Machiavelli's The Prince was the inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand)
  • How Descartes's Discourse on Method "proved" God's existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego
  • How Hobbes's Leviathan led to the belief that we have a "right" to whatever we want
  • Why Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto could win the award for the most malicious book ever written
  • How Darwin's Descent of Man proves he intended "survival of the fittest" to be applied to human society
  • How Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil issued the call for a world ruled solely by the "will to power"
  • How Hitler's Mein Kampf was a kind of "spiritualized Darwinism" that accounts for his genocidal anti-Semitism
  • How the pansexual paradise described in Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be a creation of her own sexual confusions and aspirations
  • Why Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was simply autobiography masquerading as science

    Witty, shocking, and instructive, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World offers a quick education on the worst ideas in human history and how we can avoid them in the future.

    • ©2008 Benjamin Wiker (P)2008 Tantor     Civics & Citizenship Literary History & Criticism Politics & Government Words, Language & Grammar Writing & Publishing Witty Royalty Stalin Liberalism Socialism Morality

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    All stars
    Most relevant
    The fantastic reader with his deep and dramatic voice kept this book blasting along like a horror movie. I was expecting, no, hoping, for something completely different. But what an amazing, toxic cocktail of interesting and thought provoking accounts of ideas that had consequences, some genuinely awful, but some alarmingly twisted citations carefully freed of context and deliberately misleading, all spiced up with a creeping, increasingly and bizarrely blatant Christian fundamentalism. I recommend this book to anyone with the education and critical ability to use it to understand an extreme group in today's politics, but to anyone who doesn't know that it is a mix of truths, half-truths and screwed up interpretations, this book is very dangerous. What a mega, resounding and heartbreaking disappointment. But still, food for thought, mainly about what is going on in the authors mind to be so screwed up. He missed one book that should be on the list...Atlas Shrugged.

    Amazingly screwed up.

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    False logic, straw man arguments, ridiculous generalisations, and poorly defined presumptions based on what I can only assume is a USA American Christian perspective on the Bible, and laughably inaccurate misrepresentations off well-established philosophical concepts. This author obviously disagrees with the authors that he references because they contradict his understanding of whatever Christian sect he belongs to, but instead of saying that, he does a poor job of dismantling the philosophical and logical concepts in the books he references either because he assumes that all of his readers will have the same Christian background as him, or he is hoping no one will challenge his Christian precepts.

    Pseudo intellectual nonsense used to propagate an undisclosed agenda.

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    I really enjoyed the listen to this book.

    It covered the major though influencing books of the 1900's and 2000's.

    I found it quite helpful in overhauling what the book was preaching / teaching.

    I think that because I am not American, I could not work out if the author was snarky or being silly / sarcastic.

    Abrasive but succinct

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    Wiker offers very good examples of many thinkers who have deterioritated western civilization during centuries

    Excellent and lucid

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