Here's a project idea that we can all contribute to. What books would we recommend for a publication called "1001 non fiction books to read before you die"? How would we even classify non-fiction?

Seriously I am thinking of proposing this to a publisher and if it does get that far contributions and input would be acknowledged. So,what does everyone suggest?

Ineresting idea ! The only trouble is that alot of books become obsolete over time with new info on whatever subject the book covers .

I think this is a great idea; books may become obsolete, but it is still important to read historically important books. In other words, books that changed society.

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell
The Republic by Plato
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
The Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
The Principia by Isaac Newton

Not that I'm suggesting anyone actually read The Principia.

edited to get an author correct

Message edited by its author, Jun 14, 2009, 8:47pm.

1491 by Charles C. Mann
Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

Should both be on the list, in my opinion.

Constitution of the United States of America
Charter of the United Nations

If this book became reality and it enticed people to actually read texts fundamental to modern civilization, that would be quite something, wouldn't it? The fiction "1001" would pale in comparison if it got even just a fraction of the readership.

Message edited by its author, Jun 5, 2009, 1:09pm.

It would be pretty amazing, darsu. I really want to see this happen!

Confessions of St. Augustine
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud
Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

A few that come to mind:

- Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong
(The "Little Red Book")

- Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

- The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley)

- The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine (touchstones link to incorrect book and author)

One of my beefs with that 1001 Fiction list is that it ignores whole swaths of the world -- the entire Middle East and North Africa, for example (zip, zilch, nada, not even any Mahfouz), and China. So I'm trying to think of non-fiction works from or about various parts of the world, not just the U.S., but for some reason it seems harder to think of non-fiction titles than fiction ...

Additional ideas:

Muqadimmah of Ibn Khaldun

The Rihla of Ibn Battuta

Summa Theologiae by Thomas Aquinas

Maimonides' Mishneh Torah or at least the "13 Principles of Faith." Perhaps also his Treatise on Logic.

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

The Analects of Confucius

Edited to add: The Art of War, by Sun Tzu.

(Some touchstones led to incorrect books or authors, so I omitted them.)

Message edited by its author, Jun 5, 2009, 2:12pm.

For jferrtig and message 3:Mary Wollstonecraft wrote " A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Mary Shelley, who wrote "Frankenstein" was her daughter.

whoops! That's who I mean. Thanks for catching that!

The Histories by Herodotus
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres by Copernicus
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Relativity: The Special and the General by Albert Einstein

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer and/or Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer

The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman

A History of the English Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill

The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia

Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat by Red Barber

Message edited by its author, Jun 9, 2009, 6:11pm.

What? Nobody's yet listed Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, or Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History by David Christian? :)

The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins
Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihayli
Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini
In the Shadow of Man, by Jane Goodall

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell comes to mind. Also a lot of history books, for one Johan Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages.
And I agree, books may be out of date, or have viewpoints that have changed over time, however, those books might have been influential then, might help us understand a piece of history, and have influenced later works.
I for one would love a list like this, I find myself gravitating to non-fiction work more and more (especially now I am out of school and don't have to read non-fiction for school, just for fun).

I really do like the idea for this book ! Hopefully it will happen in the near future , I would buy it ! Instead of a timeline setup like the 1001 fics book , it could be by subject . Which might be better for non-fics .

In Cold Blood
Truman
Team of Rivals
Enrique's Journey
Survival in Auschwitz
Voyage of the Beagle

I haven't read enough of the important biographies and histories, but certainly those regarding Alexander the Great, Catherine the Great, Winston Churchill, Lincoln, John Adams, Jefferson, FDR, Kennedy, Stalin, Ghandi, and many, many more need to be addressed in the book.

Message edited by its author, Jun 10, 2009, 6:41pm.

ooh, yes to Survival in Auschwitz!!

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang

Message edited by its author, Jun 14, 2009, 8:51am.

I usually don't go in for lists like this, but I highly recommend E.O. Wilson's Consilience.

This is a wonderful list and I agree with so many of the suggestions. I'd probably add some of the world's basic spiritual texts: the Bible, the Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching, the Koran. Even if you have no interest in religion, these texts have been deeply influential.

I would also add great poetry texts (and, no, poetry is not fiction): certainly, the Gilgamesh epic, Homer, the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer and Shakespeare.

I think the pre-Socratic philosophers are thought-provoking as is De rerum natura by Lucretius.

For understanding the modern world, John Reader's "Africa: A Biography of a Continent," de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," the great speeches of the last 200 years.

This would be a fabulous compendium.

Night - Elie Wiesel
Washington's Crossing - David Hackett Fischer
John Adams - David McCullough
Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville
The Federalist Papers - Hamilton and Madison
The Art of War - Sun Tzu
Eats, Shoots, and Leaves
A Manual for writers - Turabian
-- Strunk and White's Manual of Style
Silent Spring - Rachel Carson
How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
What color is your parachute

I also agree with
Diary of Anne Frank
1491
Team of Rivals
Gun, Germs & Steel
Origin of Species and/or Voyage of Beagle

Ack! Not Strunk & White - oh, the pain. Geoffrey Pullum, a grammarian and linguist, (as well as his linguistic co-conspirators over at languagelog.org) has written much on why the grammatical advice in Strunk & White is counter-productive. For example, a recent article on the subject: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i32/32b015... . Although, if you think you need to know what a lot of people believe about writing, even if it is strange, it might still be an essential read, if you do a lot of that sort of thing.

And to continue the negativity... So far there have been two mentions of Guns, Germs, and Steel. With Jared Diamond recently in trouble for being very loose with his facts in one of his articles, does anyone worry he is in danger of being punted from the realms of intellectual acceptability, and what that might do to the reputation of Guns, Germs, and Steel?

So far there have been two mentions of Guns, Germs, and Steel. With Jared Diamond recently in trouble for being very loose with his facts in one of his articles, does anyone worry he is in danger of being punted from the realms of intellectual acceptability, and what that might do to the reputation of Guns, Germs, and Steel?

No clue -- I'd not heard those allegations, nor have I ever read any of Diamond's books. I mainly mentioned the Guns, Germs and Steel because I have seen it mentioned, recommended and raved about approximately 50 zillion times in the various LT groups that I'm on. Obviously it made a big impact on people, at least here on LibraryThing! :D

benmartin, Can you post a link to the criticism of Diamond please? I have enjoyed Diamond's writing, and while he paints with a broad brush, I'm curious to hear what detractors are saying.

I've not read any of Diamond's books either.

Well, there is definitely a defamation lawsuit against Diamond - that much is factual (http://apnews.myway.com/article/20090422...). Whether the accusations are accurate are not is a separate issue, of course. Here's a fairly detailed accusation against Diamond: http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/latest-j... . And just in case I didn't make it clear, so far the only accusations relate to one specific article.

Of course, you could argue that books should be included for just that reason, them being influential (or followed) for lots of people, but in the end turning out to be false. The structure of the 1001 before you die type books gives the writer the ability to explain, so the choice can be set in the right light. It would be interesting for example maybe to read some of the anthropological books of the late nineteenth century, not because they are correct, but because they say something about society as a whole at that time....

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

I think this is a fantastic idea - I'll seek out the book after you get it published! Everything I thought of has already been mentioned (at least once), so I won't list them again.

Just realized that no one mentioned some of the ancients - Plato, Herodotus, Pliny. They need to be represented.

Message edited by its author, Jun 28, 2009, 5:48pm.

Great idea and great list so far! I especially love the comment in >3: "Not that I'm suggesting anyone actually read The Principia." It's like Finnegan's Wake on the fiction lists. As if! (Not that I'm saying it wouldn't be worthwhile if anyone actually did conquer it! I've tried 3 times and never gotten past page 10 or so....)

The Best and the Brightest - Halberstam

The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen

Annals of the Former World by John McPhee

Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop

Two or three of these have been mentioned earlier in this string:
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair,A Thousand days, John F. Kennedy in the Whitwe House by Arthur M Schlesinger,
Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Mind of The South by W. J. Cash,
Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (A History of the South) by C. Vann Woodward,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men- James Agee
New and Selected Poems, 1923-1985, Robert Penn Warren,
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and The War Years (three-volume set), Carl Sandburg
The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg by Carl Sandburg,
The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman by Harry Truman,
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by
Benjamin Franklin, Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson,
Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson: The First Three Presidents, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson by Gore Vidal

This was all I could come up with in the twenty minutes that I spent thinking about it. As you can see I am partial to the South, Presidents, and Poets.

34> Unfortunately, The Jungle is a novel.

35> Yes, of course The Jungle is fiction but I remember reading that it showed the unsanitary conditions of the meatpacking industry and helped to goad congress into passing the the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (which led to creation of the Food and Drug Administration in 1930).

Great idea!

Some more ideas (but I can think of loads more!). Some of this might be a bit Anglocentric/Eurocentric, apologies, but that's where I'm from, and I do notice some fairly American centred entries (understandably)!

Boorstin, Daniel: The Discoverers
Braudel, Fernand: The Identity of France (or pretty much anything he wrote!)
Brogan, Hugh: Penguin History of the USA (unless anyone comes up with a better one - I thought it brilliant)
Bronowski, Jacob: The Ascent of Man
Burrows, William: The New Ocean
Carlyle, Thomas: The French Revolution
Cocker, Mark: Crow Country
Cooke, Alistair: Letter from America
Evans, Richard: Third Reich trilogy
Feynman, Richard: Easy and Not-so Easy Pieces
Gibbon, Edward: History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Gombrich EH: The Story of Art
Gould, Stephen Jay: The Richness of Life(representative of his essays, or maybe Wonderful Life)
Junger, Sebastian: The Perfect Storm
Keegan, John: The Face of War
Lawrence, TE: The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Lovelock, James: Gaia, A New Look at life on Earth
Macaulay, Thomas: History of England from James the Second
Morris, Jan: Venice
Pakenham, Thomas: The Scramble for Africa
Pevsner, Niklaus: History of European Architecture
Pinker, Stephen: The Language Instinct
Raban, Jonathan: quite a choice, possibly Passage to Juneau
Rackham, Oliver: History of the English Countryside in slight preference to WG Hoskins's Making of the English Landscape
Reed, John: Ten Days that Shook the World
Roberts, JM: History of the World
Rodger NAM: The Command of the Ocean
Runciman, Stephen: History of the Crusades
Russell, Bertrand: History of Western Philosophy
Schumacher, EF: Small is Beautiful, and/or Leopold Kohr's The Breakdown of Nations
Simpson, Joe: Touching the Void
Steinbeck, John: Travels with Charley
Taylor AJP: Origins of the Second World War, or Struggle for Mastery in Europe, or collected essays (various different possibilities)
Tudge, Colin: Secret Life of Trees
Thesiger, Wilfred: The Marsh Arabs
Unsworth, Walt: Everest
Watson, James: The Double Helix
White, Gilbert: Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne
Worsley, Frank: Shackleton's Boat Journey

I'm a bit reluctant to suggest biographies, as I think they're very personal, but these are the best I've read:

Boswell, Thomas: Life of Doctor Johnson
Longford, Elizabeth: Wellington - The Years of the Sword
Tomalin, Claire: Samuel Pepys, the Unequalled Self
Uglow, Jenny: Hogarth

I'd also particularly agree with:
Rachel Carson, Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Barbara Tuchman (quite a range to choose from!), Winston Churchill (could also add The World Crisis and/or History of WW2), Richard Dawkins (but I'd go for Blind Watchmaker),

I'd disagree with the Shirer, as I'd include the Evans instead (unless there was room for 2 volumes on the Third Reich)

Message edited by its author, Jul 21, 2009, 7:38am.

Great selections.

How about Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Not easy reading, but a profound work I think.

Across the Wide Missouri Bernard DeVoto
The Civil War trilogy by Shelby Foote
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould
Admiral of the Ocean Sea by Samuel Eliot Morison
A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan
Memoirs of the Second World War by Winston Churchill

hmm maybe a bit slanted towards the American version...

Message edited by its author, Jul 25, 2009, 4:36pm.

Seeds Of Change: Five Plants That Transformed Mankind - Henry Hobhouse
An Empire Of Plants: People And Plants That Changed The World - Toby & Will Musgrave
The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing The Climate And What It Means For Life On Earth - Tim Flannery

Excellent topic.

With regards to criticisms of Diamond, they don't negatively impact the importance and insight the Guns, Germs, and Steel has had on our understanding of society. It is an important book and will remain so. Steven Ambrose is guilty of plagarism, but he's still a good historian and his books on WWII very useful and entertaining.

I would add the following

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Citizens by Simon Schama
The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan (rather than his more erudite, but imposing, multi-volume history)
What Evolution Is by Ernst Mayr
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould (I'm not sure about this one to be perfectly honest, as I'm in the Dawkins/Wilson camp when considering evolutionary science, but Gould was certainly a genius)
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bryson (popular overview of modern science)

That's all I can think of off the top of my mind. If I stuck at it, I'm sure I could come up with plenty more!

Though I'm an atheist myself, I wouldn't object to others including (if only in an appendix or special section) The Bible, the Qu'ran, the Talmud/Torah and the Bagvadhgita. Apologies to those of other faiths, whose scriptures I don't know and haven't mentioned.