Walter Anastazievsky
Evil books? Give me a break. The best way to hone your critical thinking skills is to read books from a wide range of perspectives and reflect on them - that includes books with which you vehemently disagree. Some of the books here are ones that I've literally thrown across the room, I was so repulsed. *And I'm a better thinker for having read them!* If you buy into this guys tripe, you'll remain intellectually - and I'd argue, morally - infantile. Reading a tendentious book as a lazy shortcut to having an opinion means you don't really have an opinion of your own at all. Sure, I detest Mein Kampf. I'm no fan or Nietzsche or Machiavelli. I'm very ambivalent about the Communist Manifesto - though I can see that it says a lot about the time in which it was written. You might disagree with me about Darwin (I subscribe to the theory of evolution). If you know anything about the book and the times it was written in, you'd know that it was Thomas Malthus, not Darwin, who applied evolution to human beings and opened the way for eugenics (a genuinely evil ideology - but do read about it!). Seriously, though, Descartes? Hobbes? Margaret Mead? I've read more of Hobbes than the other two, so I'll point out that while he seems retrograde to us, he developed his philosophy in opposition to the Divine Right of Kings. Not such a bad thing in my book. The only writer whom I've never read is Kinsey. So I'll keep my mouth shut about something about which I know nothing. Benjamin Winker was trained as a Catholic theologian. There is nothing wrong with that. However, the Catholic Church issued the last version of its List of Prohibited Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum) in 1948, and formally abolished it in 1966, but Professor Winker doesn't seem to have noticed, nor has he thought through the significance of that fact. Instead, he seems bent on re-establishing it in this more targeted form. Don't fall for it! As someone who is also Catholic, I'll say this: God gave you the intelligence and moral discernment to know good from evil. By not engaging and wrestling with the ideas and these books, you risk not developing your talents, but burying them in the ground. No book is wholly evil (okay, Mein Kampf is an exception). Instead, there may be some small (or even not so small) good mixed in with the ideas in any book. There really is only one way to find out, and you won't find it in Professor Winker's book. All it will do is tell you what he thinks.
Ray Mroz
To find dangerous, one only need look at the hidebound garbage being pushed by this author. And while it is quite clear that Mr Wiker does not possess even a most basic understanding of the books he critiques, the truly troubling notion is not fully appreciated until one considers its intended target; namely young, malleable homeschoolers from superstitious, intellectually bereft households. Wiker, robbing children of an opportunity for intellectual development takes special sort of sleaze bag.
Shoshanna Drach
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Like a sequel to the Turner Diaries, discussing how the acceptance of homosexuality degrades our society and destroys the family unit. I love reading all the 4 and 5 star reviews written by deranged conspiracy theorists and Nazis đ This is the first result on google when you search for "Mao's little red book". Just awesome, Google, helping push people who want to learn about communism into becoming outright fascists.