Things Fall Apart, the classic novel by Africa’s foremost novelist Chinua
Achebe, has been named one of the “fifty most influential books of the last 50
years.”
The selection was made by a group called “SuperScholar.” Achebe’s first
novel, published in 1958 and translated into more than sixty languages, is one
of several novels by other world acclaimed writers. Other novels on the list
include Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, Joseph
Heller’s Catch-22, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Achebe, who is the David and Marianna Fisher University Professor of Africana
Studies at Brown University in Providence, RI, is the author of five novels,
several volumes of poetry as well as essay collections. His latest book, There
Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, will be published in September,
2012.
50 Most Influential Books of the Last 50 (or so) Years
In compiling the books on this list, the editors at SuperScholar have tried
to provide a window into the culture of the last 50 years. Ideally, if you read
every book on this list, you will know how we got to where we are today. Not
all the books on this list are “great.” The criterion for inclusion was not
greatness but INFLUENCE. All the books on this list have been enormously
influential.
The books we chose required some hard choices. Because influence tends to be
measured in years rather than months, it’s much easier to put older books
(published in the 60s and 70s) on such a list than more recent books (published
in the last decade). Older books have had more time to prove themselves.
Selecting the more recent books required more guesswork, betting on which would
prove influential in the long run.
We also tried to keep a balance between books that everyone buys and hardly
anyone reads versus books that, though not widely bought and read, are deeply
transformative. The Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa never sold as many records as
some of the “one-hit wonders,” but their music has transformed the industry.
Influence and popularity sometimes don’t go together. We’ve tried to reflect
this in our list.
1. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), as the most widely read book in
contemporary African literature, focuses on the clash of colonialism,
Christianity, and native African culture.
2. Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979) reinvented the
science fiction genre, making it at once sociologically incisive as well as
funny.
3. Robert Atkins’ Dr Atkins’s New Diet Revolution (1992, last edition 2002)
launched the low-carbohydrate diet revolution, variants of which continue to be
seen in numerous other diet programs.
4. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006), drawing on his background as
an evolutionary theorist to elevate science at the expense of religion,
propelled the neo-atheist movement.
5. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) set the tone for
the questioning of political correctness and the reassertion of a “canon” of
Western civilization.
6. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003), an entertaining thriller, has been
enormously influential in getting people to think that Jesus is not who
Christians say he is and that Christianity is all a conspiracy.
7. Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970) transformed the way we
view native Americans as they lost their land, lives, and dignity to expanding
white social and military pressures.
8. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) more than any other book helped
launch the environmental movement.
9. Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957), laying out his ideas of
transformational grammar, revolutionized the field of linguistics and at the
same time dethroned behaviorism in psychology.
10. Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People (1989) set the
standard for books on leadership and effectiveness in business.
11. Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box (1996), though roundly rejected by the
scientific community, epitomizes the challenge of so-called intelligent design
to evolutionary theory and has spawned an enormous literature, both pro and
con.
12. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), in employing evolutionary
determinism as a lens for understanding human history, reignited grand history
making in the spirit Spengler and Toynbee.
13. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose (1980) examines, in the context of a
mystery at a medieval monastery, the key themes of premodernity, modernity and
postmodernity.
14. Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1962) provides a particularly
effective answer to totalitarian attempts to crush the human spirit, showing
how humanity can overcome horror and futility through finding meaning and
purpose.
15. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), in giving expression to
the discontent women felt in being confined to the role of homemaker, helped
galvanize the women’s movement.
16. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962) argued that capitalism
constitutes a necessary condition for political liberties and thus paved the
way for the conservative economics of the Reagan years.
17. Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence (1995) showed clearly how skills
in dealing with and reading emotions can be even more important than the
cognitive skills that are usually cited as the official reason for career
advancement.
18. Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man (1971), in relating her experiences
with chimpanzees in the wild, underscored the deep connection between humans
and the rest of the animal world.
19. John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1992), in
highlighting and elevating the differences between men and women in their
relationships, challenged the contention that gender differences are socially
constructed.
20. Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), by personalizing the tragic history of
American slavery through the story of Kunta Kinte, provided a poignant
challenge to racism in America.
21. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988, updated and expanded 1998),
by one of the age’s great physicists, attempts to answer the big questions of
existence, not least how the universe got here.
22. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) etched into public consciousness a deep
skepticism of bureaucracies, which in the book are portrayed as self-serving
and soul-destroying.
23. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, last
edition 1978) changed our view of science from a fully rational enterprise to
one fraught with bias and irrational elements.
24. Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1981)
transformed people’s view of God, exonerating God of evil by making him less
than all-powerful.
25. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) served as prelude to the civil
rights advances of the 1960s by portraying race relations from a fresh
vantage—the vantage of an innocent child untainted by surrounding racism and
bigotry.
26. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), as an
example magical realism, epitomizes the renaissance in Latin American
literature.
27. Alasdair McIntyre’s After Virtue (1981, last edition 2007) is one of the
20th century’s most important works of moral philosophy, critiquing the
rationalism and irrationalism that pervade modern moral discourse.
28. Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) provides a profound and moving
reflection on the impact of American slavery.
29. Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984-89) is a quintet of novels in
Arabic focusing on the psychological, sociological, and economic impact on the
Middle East of oil.
30. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed> (1965), attacking car industry’s
lax safety standards, not only improved the safety of cars but also
mainstreamed consumer protection (we take such protections for granted now).
31. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks’ The 9/11 Commission Report
(2004), though not the final statement on the 9/11 disaster, encapsulated the
broader threat of terrorism in the new millennium.
32. Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind (1988) provides a sweeping view
of 20thcentury’s scientific advances while at the same time challenging the
reductionism prevalent among many scientists.
33. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) has become a key inspiration for
conservative economics in challenging entitlements and promoting unimpeded
markets.
34. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971, last edition 1999) is the most
significant effort to date to resolve the problem of distributive justice and
has formed the backdrop for public policy debates.
35. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series (seven volumes, 1997-2007), loved by
children, panned by many literary critics, has nonetheless set the standard for
contemporary children’s literature.
36. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), which led Iran’s Ayatollah
Khomeini to issue a death edict (fatwa) against Rushdie, underscored the clash
between Islamic fundamentalism and Western civilization.
37. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980), based on his wildly popular PBS series by
the same name, inspired widespread interest in science while promoting the idea
that nothing beyond the cosmos exists.
38. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001) details the massive impact that
the U.S. fast food industry has had on people’s diets not just in the U.S. but
also across the globe.
39. Amartya Sen’s Resources, Values and Development (1984, last edition
1997) develops an approach to economics that, instead of focusing on utility
maximization, attempts to alleviate human suffering by redressing the poverty
that results from economic mismanagement.
40. B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) attacked free will and
moral autonomy in an effort to justify the use of scientific (behavioral)
methods in improving society.
41. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (in three volumes,
1974-78) relentlessly exposed the totalitarian oppression of the former Soviet
Union and, more than any other book, was responsible for its government’s
subsequent dissolution.
42. Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capitalism (2000) argues that the
absence of legal infrastructure, especially as it relates to property, is the
key reason that capitalism fails when it does fail.
43. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946,
last edition 2004) sold 50 million copies and revolutionized how Americans
raise their children.
44. Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan (2007, last edition 2010) provides the
most trenchant critique to date of the financial and monetary backdrop to the
current economic crisis.
45. Mao Tse-tung’s The Little Red Book, aka Quotations From Chairman Mao
(1966) was required reading throughout China and epitomized his political and
social philosophy.
46. Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life (2002), though addressed to the
American evangelical culture, has crossed boundaries and even led to Warren
giving the invocation at President Obama’s inauguration.
47. James D. Watson’s The Double Helix (1969), in presenting a personal
account of his discovery, with Francis Crick, of the structure of DNA, not only
recounted one of the 20thcentury’s greatest scientific discoveries but also
showed how science, as a human enterprise, really works.
48. E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (1975) challenged the idea that cultural
evolution can be decoupled from biological evolution, thus engendering the
fields of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary ethics.
49. Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), written posthumously
by Alex Haley from interviews, portrays a complex activist for human rights at
a complex time in American history.
50. Muhammad Yunus’ Banker to the Poor (1999, last edition 2007) lays out
how “micro-lending” made it possible to provide credit to the poor, thereby
offering a viable way to significantly diminish world poverty.
Obasanjo
