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
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    What listeners say about 10 Books That Screwed Up the World

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    Pseudo intellectual nonsense used to propagate an undisclosed agenda.

    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.

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    Abrasive but succinct

    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.

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    Excellent and lucid

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

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