Controversial Books

This page shows your 100 most controversial books, as measured by the standard deviation of members star ratings. (This is also the source of the Zeitgeist category "25 Books People Can't Agree on.") To be included, a book must have been rated at least 20 times. Work titles are given.

Standard
Deviation
RatingTitle
1.1893.58Empire by Michael Hardt
1.1613.23Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead by Tamara Draut
1.0973.78Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida
1.0914.03The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
1.0753.47Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry
1.0733.88History and Class Consciousness by Georg Lukács
1.0733.65The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx
1.0713.68The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry by Harold Bloom
1.073.52Nadja by André Breton
1.063.61Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud
1.0593.8History of beauty by Umberto Eco
1.0583.63The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge by Jean-Francois Lyotard
1.0573.46Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud
1.0534.04Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas by Charles Harrison
1.0493.89Beloved by Toni Morrison
1.0463.79The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
1.0463.97The Craft of Research by Wayne C. Booth
1.0393.73The Bombshell Manual of Style by Laren Stover
1.0383.74The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism by Thomas Frank
1.0354.24The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957–1987 by Octavio Paz
1.0353.74The Marx-Engels Reader by Karl Marx
1.0343.51JPod by Douglas Coupland
1.0343.88Underworld by Don DeLillo
1.0153.83When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom
1.0143.45You're Wearing That?: Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation by Deborah Tannen
1.0033.61Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
1.0024.09The Waves by Virginia Woolf
1.0014.18Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
1.0013.6The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
0.9993.65Generation T: 108 Ways to Transform a T-Shirt by Megan Nicolay
0.9983.19Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate by Naomi Klein
0.9983.92Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
0.9974.07The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard
0.9963.52On Dreams by Sigmund Freud
0.9954.11The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh
0.9943.81The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells
0.9924.14Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader by William S. Burroughs
0.9893.56Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole by Benjamin R. Barber
0.9823.48Vamps & Tramps: New Essays by Camille Paglia
0.973.64Gorgias by Plato
0.973.9Beyond Good & Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
0.9693.71The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies by Marcel Mauss
0.9674.2Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 14) by Georges Bataille
0.963.95Cinema 2: The Time-Image by Gilles Deleuze
0.9583.69Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland
0.9563.89Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi
0.9563.5Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious by Sigmund Freud
0.9523.71No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs by Naomi Klein
0.9514.34Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein
0.9493.81Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt
0.9453.84On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
0.9453.76Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson
0.9434.22Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey
0.943.96The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change by David Harvey
0.9373.88Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler
0.9364.2Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life by Theodor W. Adorno
0.9343.74Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
0.9313.59Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud
0.933.8Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault
0.9273.74Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton
0.9233.99A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich
0.9213.9Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates by Slavoj Žižek
0.9153.83The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed by Joseph Heath
0.9143.9After Theory by Terry Eagleton
0.9063.9720,000 Years of Fashion: The History of Costume and Personal Adornment by Francois Boucher
0.9024.19The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait by Frida Kahlo
0.93.78The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond
0.8873.61A Short Guide to Writing About Art by Sylvan Barnet
0.8863.95Civilization & Capitalism 15th-18th Century (3 Volumes): The Structures of Everyday Life, The Wheels of Commerce, The Perspective of the World by Fernand Braudel
0.8864.09On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche
0.8843.66The Culture Industry: Selected essays on mass culture by Theodor Adorno
0.8813.78Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
0.884.14Selected Stories by Robert Walser
0.883.87Cinema 1: Movement-Image by Gilles Deleuze
0.883.79Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag
0.8784.18Aesthetic Theory by Theodor W. Adorno
0.8733.7Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz
0.8734.09Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
0.873.85Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex by Judith P. Butler
0.8653.42Culture Jam by Kalle Lasn
0.863.86Outline of a Theory of Practice by Pierre Bourdieu
0.8593.86The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes
0.8453.83The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch
0.8313.93Second Nature by Michael Pollan
0.833.91Good Muslim, Bad Muslim by Mahmood Mamdani
0.8254.16Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste by Pierre Bourdieu
0.8243.74The North China Lover by Marguerite Duras
0.8214.24The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
0.8163.88Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler by Thomas Frank
0.8133.99The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them by Amy Goodman
0.8093.98Dictionary of Accepted Ideas by Gustave Flaubert
0.8074.33Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
0.8064.16Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds
0.8064.23S,M,L,XL by Rem Koolhaas
0.8063.95Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson
0.83.61On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense by David Brooks
0.7943.93On the Natural History of Destruction by W. G. Sebald
0.7934.02The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 by Eric Hobsbawm
0.7924.25The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
0.7914.34Vice Dos and Don'ts: 10 Years of VICE Magazine's Street Fashion Critiques by Suroosh Alvi
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