10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help

Benjamin Wiker, Ph.D.

Sept 2008 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Robertson Dean

About this audiobook

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 his scintillating new book, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help, he seizes each of these evil books by its malignant heart and exposes it to the light of day. In this witty, learned, and provocative expose, 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.

Ratings and reviews

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.

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.

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 😂 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.

About the author

Benjamin Wiker writes full-time as a senior fellow at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology and is coauthor, with Jonathan Witt, of A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature.

Robertson Dean has recorded hundreds of audiobooks in almost every genre. He's been nominated for several Audie Awards, won nine Earphones Awards, and was named one of AudioFile magazine's Best Voices of 2010. He lives in Los Angeles, where he records books and acts in film, TV, and (especially) on stage.