The Modern Library | 100 Best Nonfiction by The Modern Library
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1. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
The Education of Henry Adams records the struggle of Bostonian Henry Adams (1838-1918), in early old age, to come to terms with the dawning 20th century, so different from the world of his youth. I...
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2. The Varieties of Religious Experience by Will James
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is a book by the Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James that comprises his edited Gifford Lectures on "Natural Theology" d...
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3. Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
Up from Slavery is the 1901 autobiography of Booker T. Washington detailing his slow and steady rise from a slave child during the Civil War, to the difficulties and obstacles he overcame to get an...
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4. A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by . First published during 24 October 1929, it was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges ...
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5. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Silent Spring is a book written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin in September 1962. The book is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement. When Silent Spri...
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6. Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot by T. S. Eliot
This is the first large and representative book of T. S. Eliot's prose and it is being published just at the time when Mr. Eliot is returning to America for the Harvard lectures. A year ago Edmund ...
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7. The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA by James D. Watson
The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA is an autobiographical account of the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA written by James D. Watson and pub...
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8. Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
Speak, Memory is an autobiographical memoir by writer Vladimir Nabokov. The first twelve chapters describe Nabokov's remembrance of his youth in a quasi-aristocratic family living in pre-revolut...
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9. The American Language by H. L. Mencken
The American Language, first published in 1919, is H. L. Mencken's book about the English language as spoken in the United States. Mencken was inspired by "the argot of the colored waiters" in W...
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10. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was written by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. The book, generally considered to be his magnum opus, is largely credited with creatin...
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11. The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas
The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher is a 1974 collection of 29 essays written by Lewis Thomas for the New England Journal of Medicine during the preceding three years. The pieces are lo...
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12. The Frontier in American History by Frederick Jackson Turner
One of the most influential and important books written about the impact of frontier life on a transplanted civilization. Reprinted from original 1920 edition, this edition lucidly reflects Jackson...
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13. Black Boy by Richard Wright
Black Boy is an autobiography by Richard Wright. Depicting Wright's life in great detail, the book tells the story of his troubled youth and race relations in the South. It is about the struggles t...
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14. Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster
The wit and lively, informed originality Forster employs in his study of the novel has made this book a classic. Deliberately avoiding the chronological development approach of what he classifies '...
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15. The Civil War by Shelby Foote
The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-1974) is a three volume, 2,968-page, 1.2 million-word history of the American Civil War by Shelby Foote. Although previously known as a novelist, Foote is most famo...
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16. The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
The Guns of August, originally published as August 1914 (1962), is a military history book written by Barbara Tuchman. It primarily describes the events of the first month of World War I. The focus...
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17. The Proper Study of Mankind by Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin was one of the leading thinkers of our time and one of its finest writers. The Proper Study of Mankind brings together his most celebrated writing: here the reader will find Berlin's ...
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18. Nature and Destiny of Man by Reinhold Niebuhr
Arguably Niebuhl's most important work, this book offers a sustained articulation of his theological ethics and is considered a landmark in 20th-century thought. This book issues a challenge to Wes...
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19. Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
Notes of a Native Son collects ten of Baldwin's essays, which had previously appeared in such magazines as Harper's Magazine, Partisan Review, and The New Leader. The essays mostly tackle issues of...
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20. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
Largely to amuse herself, Gertrude Stein wrote this book in 1932..using as a sounding board her companion Miss Toklas, who had been with her for twenty-five years. The book is full of the most luci...
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21. The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr, E. B. White
The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, is an American English writing style guide. It is the best-known and most influential prescriptive treatment of English grammar and us...
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22. An American Dilemma by Gunnar Myrdal
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy is a 1944 study of race relations authored by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and funded by The Carnegie Foundation. The foundation chose...
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23. The Principia Mathematica by Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell
The Principia Mathematica is a 3-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. PM, as it is often abbreviated (not to be confused with Ru...
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24. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
The Mismeasure of Man is a 1981 book written by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002). The book is a history and critique of the methods and motivations underlying biological det...
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25. The Mirror and the Lamp by Meyer Howard Abrams
This clear, accessible account of Hegelian logic makes a case for its enormous seductiveness, its surprising presence in the collective consciousness, and the dangers associated therewith. Offering...
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27. The Ants by E. O. Wilson, Bert Hölldobler
This book is primarily aimed at academics as a reference work, detailing the anatomy, physiology, social organization, ecology, and natural history of ants. The Ants is a Pulitzer Prize-winning...
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28. A Theory of Justice by John Rawls
A Theory of Justice is a widely-read book of political philosophy and ethics by John Rawls. Rawls attempts to solve the problem of distributive justice by utilising a variant of the familiar dev...
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29. Art and Illusion by Ernest H. Gombrich
Considered a great classic by all who seek for a meeting ground between science and the humanities, Art and Illusion examines the history and psychology of pictorial representation in light of pres...
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30. The Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson
The Making of the English Working Class is an influential and pivotal work of English social history.
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31. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois
The Souls of Black Folk is a classic work of American literature by W. E. B. Du Bois. It is a seminal work in the history of sociology, and a cornerstone of African-American literary history. Th...
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32. Principia Ethica by George Moore
Principia Ethica is a Monograph by philosopher George Moore, first published in 1903. It is one of the standard texts of modern ethics, and introduced the term naturalistic fallacy.
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34. On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
The central theme of On Growth and Form is that biologists of its author's day overemphasized evolution as the fundamental determinant of the form and structure of living organisms, and underemphas...
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35. Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein
Ideas and Opinions contains essays by eminent scientist Albert Einstein on subjects ranging from atomic energy, relativity, and religion to human rights, and economics. Previously published article...
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36. The Age of Jackson by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Jackson. It is a triumph of historical scholarship, analysis, and interpretation and throws much new light on a host of Americans, well...
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37. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a book written by Richard Rhodes, won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award. The 900-page bo...
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38. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is an 1,181-page travel book written by Dame Rebecca West, published in 1941. The book gives an account of Balkan history and ethnography, and the significance of Nazi...
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39. Autobiographies by W. B. Yeats
Autobiographies is made up of six autobiographical works that Yeats published in the mid 1930s. Together, they provide a fascinating insight into the first 58 years of his life. The work provides m...
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40. Science and Civilisation in China by Joseph Needham
Science and Civilisation in China is a series of books initiated and edited by British biochemist and China scholar Joseph Needham (1900-1995). They deal with the history of science and technology ...
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41. Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves
Good-bye to All That is the autobiography of Robert Graves. First published in 1929, the work is a landmark anti-war memoir of life in the trenches during World War I. The title expresses Graves' d...
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42. Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
Homage to Catalonia is political journalist and novelist George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War, written in the first person.
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43. The Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain
Mark Twain’s Autobiography is a two-volume set published over ten years after Twain's death in order to protect the "guilty". It was well received, as the public was hungry for some new books by Ma...
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44. Children of Crisis by Robert Coles
Children of Crisis is an award winning series of 5 volumes by child psychiatrist and author Robert Coles published by Little, Brown and Company between 1967 and 1977; a social study of children in ...
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45. A Study of History by Arnold J. Toynbee
A Study of History is the 12-volume magnum opus of British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, finished in 1961. In this immensely detailed and complex work, Toynbee traces the birth, growth and decay of ...
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46. The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
The Affluent Society is a 1958 book by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. The book sought to clearly outline the manner in which the post-World War II America was becoming wealthy in the pri...
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47. Present at the Creation by Dean Acheson
Acheson (1893-1971) was not only present at the creation of the postwar world, he was one of its chief architects. He joined the Department of State in 1941 as Assistant Secretary of State for Econ...
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48. Great Bridge by David McCullough
This monumental book is the enthralling story of one of the greatest events in our nation's history, during the Age of Optimism — a period when Americans were convinced in their hearts that all thi...
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49. Patriotic Gore by Edmund Wilson
Critical/biographical portraits of such notable figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Ambrose Bierce, Mary Chesnut, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Oliver Wendell Holme...
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50. Samuel Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate
This 1979 chronicle is seen by critics not only as the definitive life of Dr. Johnson, but as a model of well-researched, lucid, fair--but always affectionate--biography.
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51. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
This book describes Malcolm X's upbringing in Michigan, his maturation to adulthood in Boston and New York, his time in prison, his conversion to Islam, his ministry, his travels to Africa and to M...
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52. The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
The Right Stuff is a 1979 book by Tom Wolfe about the pilots engaged in U.S. postwar experiments with experimental rocket-powered, high-speed aircraft as well as documenting the stories of the firs...
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53. Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
Eminent Victorians is a book by Lytton Strachey (the oldest member of the Bloomsbury Group), first published in 1918 and consisting of biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era. It...
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54. Working by Studs Terkel
Working (full title: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do) is a book by the noted oral historian and radio broadcaster Studs Terkel. It is an exploration o...
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55. Darkness Visible by William Styron
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness is U.S. writer William Styron's memoir about his descent into depression, and the triumph of recovery. First published in December 1989 in Vanity Fair, the ...
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56. The Liberal Imagination by Lionel Trilling
The Liberal Imagination is one of the most admired and influential works of criticism of the last century, a work that is not only a masterpiece of literary criticism but an important statement abo...
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57. The Second World War by Winston Churchill
The Second World War is a six-volume history of the period from the end of the First World War to July 1945, written by Sir Winston Churchill. It was largely responsible for him winning (in 1953) t...
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58. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
Out of Africa is a memoir by Isak Dinesen, a nom de plume used by the Danish author Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke. The book, first published in 1937, recounts events of the seventeen years when...
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59. Jefferson and His Time by Dumas Malone
Dumas Malone's classic biography "Jefferson and His Time" — originally published in six volumes over a period of thirty-four years, between 1948 and 1982 — was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in history...
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60. In the American Grain by William Carlos Williams
Essays ranging in theme from Christopher Columbis to Abraham Lincoln about what it means to be an American. Although admired by D. H. Lawrence, this modern classic went generally unnoticed duri...
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61. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner
Cadillac Desert is about land development and water policy in the western United States. Subtitled The American West and its Disappearing Water, it gives the history of the Bureau of Reclamation an...
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62. The House of Morgan by Ron Chernow
The winner of the National Book Award and now considered a classic, The House of Morgan is the most ambitious history ever written about an American banking dynasty. Acclaimed by The Wall Street Jo...
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63. The Sweet Science by A. J. Liebling
A.J. Liebling's classic New Yorker pieces on the "sweet science of bruising" bring vividly to life the boxing world as it once was. It depicts the great events of boxing's American heyday: Sugar Ra...
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64. The Open Society by Karl Popper
The Open Society and Its Enemies is an influential two-volume work by Karl Popper written during World War II. Failing to find a publisher in the United States, it was first printed in London by Ro...
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65. The Art of Memory by Frances A. Yates
The Art of Memory is a 1966 non-fiction book by British historian Frances A. Yates. The book follows the history of mnemonic systems from the classical period of Simonides of Ceos in Ancient Greece...
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67. A Preface to Morals by Walter Lippmann
Lippman, a Pulitzer Prize winning political columnist, helped found the liberal New Republic magazine. His writings there influenced Woodrow Wilson, who selected Lippman to help formulate his famou...
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68. The Gate of Heavenly Peace by Jonathan Spence
Chronicles the history of the Chinese Revolution, focusing on the people and events of modern Chinese history, the writings of modern Chinese authors, the issues facing the People's Republic, and m...
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69. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an analysis of the history of science. Its publication was a landmark event in the sociology of knowledge, and popularized the terms paradigm and paradigm...
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70. The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward
The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Boar...
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71. The Rise of the West by William H. McNeill
The Rise of the West explores human history in terms of the effect of different world civilizations on one another. McNeill assumes "decent familiarity with Western history," which allows describin...
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72. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
The first major and eminently readable book on gnosticism benefiting from the discovery in 1945 of a collection of Gnostic Christian texts at Nag Hammadi in Egypt.
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73. James Joyce by Richard Ellmann
This acclaimed biography has won both the James Tait Black and the Duff Cooper Memorial Prizes, and is considered by many to be the definitive account of Joyce's life and work. The fresh materia...
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74. Florence Nightingale by Cecil Woodham-Smith
Draws on research by army historians to describe the cover-up of disastrous events in the Crimea, and to seperate Nightingale's real achievments from her mythical ones.
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75. The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
Fussell's landmark study of WWI remains as original and gripping today as ever before: a literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, the one that changed a generation, ushered in...
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76. The City in History by Lewis Mumford
The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects is a 1961 National Book Award winner by American historian Lewis Mumford. In the book Mumford urges for a world not in wh...
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77. Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era is a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the American Civil War published in 1988 by James M. McPherson. Writing for the The New York Times, historian Hugh Br...
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78. Why We Can't Wait by Martin Luther King
Why we can't wait is a book by Martin Luther King, Jr. about the civil rights struggle against racial segregation in the United States, and specifically in Birmingham, Alabama.
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79. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (1979) is a Pulitzer Prize winning biography of President Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. It is the first in a planned trilogy with the second volume Theodore Re...
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80. Studies in Iconology by Erwin Panofsky
Here, the themes and concepts of Renaissance art are analysed and related to both classical and medieval tendencies.
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81. The Face of Battle by John Keegan
The Face of Battle, is a 1976 non-fiction book on military history by the English military historian John Keegan. It deals with the structure of warfare in three time periods—medieval Europe, th...
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82. The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield
The Strange Death of Liberal England is a book written by George Dangerfield, first published in 1935, attempting to explain the decline of the British Liberal Party in the years 1910 to 1914.
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83. Vermeer by Lawrence Gowing
Lawrence Gowing's classic study has long been treasured for the painterly sensibilities he brought to this greatly loved body of work.
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84. A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan
A Bright Shining Lie is a book by Neil Sheehan, a former New York Times reporter who covered the Vietnam War. It is about U.S. Army retired Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann and the United States i...
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85. West With the Night by Beryl Markham
West With the Night is a 1942 memoir by Beryl Markham, chronicling her experiences growing up in Kenya (then British East Africa), in the early 1900s, leading to a career as a bush pilot there. It ...
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86. This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff
This Boy's Life is a memoir by Tobias Wolff first published in 1989. It describes the author's adolescence as he wanders the continental United States with his itinerant mother. The first leg of th...
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87. A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy
A 1940 essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy. It concerns the aesthetics of mathematics with some personal content, and gives the layman an insight into the mind of a working mathematician.
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88. The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P. Feynman
Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988) was widely recognized as the most creative physicist of the post–World War II period. His career was extraordinarily expansive. From his contributions to the developm...
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89. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a 1974 nonfiction narrative book by Annie Dillard. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. The book is about Dillard's experiences at Tinker Creek, which is located in Virg...
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90. The Golden Bough by James George Frazer
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). It first was ...
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91. Shadow and ACT by Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America.
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92. The Power Broker by Robert Caro
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 biography of Robert Moses, "New York City's Master Builder", by Robert Caro. In the years since its publicat...
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93. The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter
The American Political Tradition is a 1948 book by Richard Hofstadter, an account on the ideology of previous U.S. presidents and other political figures. The full title is The American Political T...
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94. Contours of American History by William Appleman Williams
The obvious result of years of scholarly research, this vast tome by a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, author of The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, etc., presents a lengthy int...
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95. The Promise of American Life by Herbert Croly
The Promise of American Life is a book published by Herbert Croly, founder of The New Republic, in 1909. This book opposed aggressive unionization and supported economic planning to raise general q...
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96. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no appar...
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97. The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm
The Journalist and the Murderer is a 1990 study by Janet Malcolm about the ethics of journalism. Attracting heavy criticism upon first publication, it is now regarded as a "seminal" work.
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98. The Taming of Chance by Ian Hacking
In this important new study Ian Hacking continues the enquiry into the origins and development of certain characteristic modes of contemporary thought undertaking in such previous works as the best...
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99. Operating Instructions by Anne Lamott
"I woke up with a start at 4:00 one morning and realized that I was very, very pregnant." So begins novelist Anne Lamott's journal of the birth of her son, Sam, and their first year together. She m...
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