As the clock clicked down on the arrival of the new millennium, Alex and I were bemused at the spate of “100 best of the century lists” pouring forth from the New York Times, the New Yorker, Salon, the Guardian and other liberal publications. The lists were predictable and not many of the entries remained on our groaning shelves. So we decided to compile our own catalogue of the best books written in English and, later translated into English, during the 20th Century. We spent weeks whittling it down to roughly 100 titles for each. These became reading lists for like-minded CounterPunchers and proved two of the most popular pieces we’d ever run on the website, even pricking the interest of many librarians who were forced to confront the gaps in their own collections.
Over the decade, those pages were up on the site they attracted well-over two million unique visitors. Then disaster struck. During the Great Transformation of the CounterPunch website to a Word Press platform, those lists were mangled beyond recognition. I remember calling Alex and telling him to cautiously look at the wreckage. He clicked on the page, gasped and even sniffled a bit. “It’s the burning of the Alex…andria library all over again!” he quipped. Neither of us had the energy to recreate the lost pages.
Since then we’ve received many pleas to resurrect those lists, the most recent coming from an old pal of ours whose book had earned a spot in the top 100. Finally, I relented. I spent the last couple of weeks reviewing the entries and some old email exchanges with Alex about books that we both admired, which had been published in the intervening years. So we now present once again our 100 best non-fiction books translated into English in the 20th century (with a few important additions), along with the introduction we wrote for our book Serpents in the Garden. (Click here to read our list of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books in English of the 20th Cen. and Beyond.)
Jeffrey St. Clair
Serpents in the Garden
We edit CounterPunch, the popular radical website and magazine. We have fun doing it and we spend a lot of time laughing, as we chat on the phone between Petrolia, in Humboldt County, northern California, and Oregon City, Oregon, perched over the Clackamas River, a few hundred miles north across the Siskiyous, in a whole different weather system.
In the Sixties and Seventies, respectively, we both read English at college, Cockburn at Oxford, St. Clair at American University. English is a discipline that says, or used to say before the critical theorists seized power and put pleasure to the sword, that it’s okay to enjoy reading books and okay to put off more or less permanently what you’re going to do when you grow up: yet another definition of being a journalist or pamphleteer. We both like the blues and food and there’s a lot about both in CounterPunch. We both think that a big part of being radical in the best sense of the word is in enjoying, promoting, defending art and the spirit of freedom and pleasure and craft skills embodied by the arts. By the quality of life, art and freedom that radicals commend, so will radicals prevail.
You want to know where we stand? A few years ago we asked ourselves, and some friends, what we would include in the hundred best non-fiction books in the original English, published in the twentieth century—more or less. The library we’d send to other planets, or to George W. Bush (although we know Laura the Librarian is doing her best…) Then we asked ourselves and our friends about books in translation and music and films. But more of that later.
Culture, music, art, architecture and … sex. In the sixties the right thought the left had the best drugs and the best sex. Now? Well, the left sort of won that battle. These days the right knows its okay to have a good time and sneers at the left for staying at home to read up on theories of surplus value. But there are always subversive and revolutionary perspectives to be enjoyed in the Garden of Eden. And in the battle to return to that delightful piece of real estate, there were heroes thus far unsung, many of them writers. For every pleasure we enjoy, there’s a martyr in our past who paid the price.
Now for that reading list, so you can get acquainted with us.
AC / JSC
April, 2004
Anna Ahkmatova: My Half-Century: Selected Prose
Louis Althusser: For Marx
Roald Amundsen: The South Pole: An Account of the Norwegian Antarctic Expedition, 1910-1912
Antonin Artaud: Theater and Its Double
Theodor Adorno: Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life
Philippe Aries: The Hour of Our Death: Wester Attitudes Toward Death
Erich Auerbach: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space
Roland Barthes: Mythologies
Georges Bataille: Eroticism: Death and Sensuality
Hanna Batatu: The Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi Revolutions: Some Observations on Their Underlying Causes and Social Character
Andre Bazin: Orson Welles: a Critical View
Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex
Walter Benjamin: Illuminations
Black Elk: Black Elk Speaks
Marc Bloch: Feudal Society
Franz Boas: Chinook Texts
Jorge Luis Borges: Other Inquisitions
Pierre Bourdieu: Acts of Resistance
Fernand Braudel: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
Bertolt Brecht: The Development of an Aesthetic
Andre Breton: Manifestoes of Surrealism
Luis Bunuel: My Last Sigh
Walter Burkert: Homo Necans: the Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth
Roger Caillois: Man, Play and Games
Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus
Cornelius Castoriadis: Political and Social Writings
Alexander V. Chayanov: Theory of Peasant Economy
Le Corbusier: Towards a New Architecture
Curnonsky: Traditional French Cooking
Euclides da Cunha: Rebellion in the Backlands
Salvador Dali: The Secret Life of Salvador Dali
Guy Debord: The Society of the Spectacle
Jacques Derrida: Of Grammatology
Marcel Detienne: Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology
Rene Dumont: Stranglehold on Africa
Sergei Eisenstein: Film Form
Mircea Eliaade: The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion
Norbert Elias: The Civilizing Process
Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth
Hassan Fathy: Architecture for the Poor: an Experiment in Rural Egypt
Elie Faure: History of Art
Marc Ferro: Cinema and History
Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison
Michel Foucault: The History of Sexuality: an Introduction
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
Paulo Freire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Sigmund Freud: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Sigmund Freud: Three Essays in the Theory of Sexuality
Karl von Frisch: The Dancing Bees: an Account of the Life and Senses of the Honey Bee
Birute Galdikas: Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo
Eduardo Galeano: Memory of Fire
Mohandas Gandhi: Gandhi: An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
Jean Genet: Prisoner of Love
Vo Nguyen Giap: How We Won the War
Andre Gide: Travels in the Congo
Sigfried Giedion: Mechanization Takes Command
P.V. Glob: The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved
Andre Gorz: Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology
Serge Guilbaut: How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art
Ernst Hans Gombrich: Art and Illusion
Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks
Ernesto “Che” Guevera: Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956-58
Gustavo Gutierrez: A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation
Heinrich Harrer: Seven Years in Tibet
Arnold Hauser: The Social History of Art
Martin Heidegger: Being and Time
Martin Heidegger: What is Called Thinking?
Maurice Herzog: Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8,000 Meter Peak
Werner Herzog: Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of Fitzcarraldo
Thor Heyerdahl: Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft
Max Horkheimer & Theodor Adorno: The Dialectic of Enlightenment
Johan Huizinga: Autumn of the Middle Ages
Luce Irigary: This Sex Which Is Not One
Teiji Itoh: The Gardens of Japan
Hans Jonas: The Gnostic Religion
Carl Jung (Introduction): I Ching or Book of Changes
Carl Jung, with Aniela Jaffe: Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Alain Danielou (Translator): Kama-Sutra: Complete and Unexpurgated Translation
Lilikala Kame’Eleihiwa: A Legendary Tradition of Kamapua’a: The Hawai’ian Pig-God
Jan Kott: Shakespeare Our Contemporary
Richard von Krafft-Ebing: Psychopathia Sexualis
Petr Kropotkin: The Conquest of Bread
Emmanuel Le Roi Ladurie: Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error
Vladimir Lenin: The State and Revolution
Georges Lefebvre: The Coming of the French Revolution
Henri Lefebvre: Critique of Everyday Life
Miguel Leon-Portilla: The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico
Claude Levi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques
Carlo Levi: Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year
Primo Levi: The Periodic Table
El Lissitsky: Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution
Adolf Loos: Ornament and Crime
Konrad Lorenz: Man Meets Dog
Georg Lukacs: History and Class Consciousness
Patrice Lumumba: Lumumba Speaks: The Speaches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba
Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution?
Alma Mahler-Werfel: The Diaries
Samuel Manaiakalani Kamakau: The Works of the People of Old: Na Hana a Ka Po’E Kahiko
Mao Tse-Tung: On Guerilla Warfare
Subcomandante Marcos: Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiques of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapista Army of National Liberation
Herbert Marcuse: Eros and Civilization: a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud
Marcel Mauss: The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
Rigoberta Menchu: I, Rigobeta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala
Maurice Merleau Ponty: Sense and Non-Sense
Dmitry Svyatopolk Mirsky: A History of Russian Literature: From Its beginnings to 1900
Arne Naess: Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy
Franz Neumann: Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-44
Kenzaburo Oe: Hiroshima Notes
Erwin Panofsky: Perspective as Symbolic Form
Vilfredo Pareto: The Mind and Society
Pele: My Life and the Beautiful Game
Vladimir Aioakovlevich Propp: Morphology of the Folktale
Wilhelm Reich: Character Analysis
Jean Renoir: Renoir, My Father
Alain Robbe-Grillet: For a New Novel
Nawal el Saadawi: Memoirs from the Women’s Prison
Jean-Paul Sartre: War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War, 1939-40
Jean-Paul Sartre: The Words
Ferdinand de Saussure: The Course in General Linguistics
Gershom Gerhard Scholem: Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah
Gaynor Sekimori (Translator): Hibakusha: Accounts by Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Victor Serge: Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Sei Shonagon: Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
Georg Simmel: The Philosophy of Money
Peter Sloterdijk: Critique of Cynical Reason
Georges Sorel: Reflections on Violence
Konstantin Stanislavski: An Actor Prepares
N.N. Sukhanov: The Russian Revolution, 1917: an Eyewitness Account
D.T. Suzuki: An Introduction to Zen Buddhism
Dennis Tedlock (Translator): Popol Vuh: the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life
Robert Thurman (Translator): Tibetan Book of the Dead
Niko Tinbergen: Curious Naturalists
Ernst Troeltsch: The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches
Leon Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution
Francois Truffaut: The Films in My Life
Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters
Immanuel Velikovsky: Worlds in Collision
Paul Veyne: The Roman Empire
Franz Werfel: The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Simone Weil: The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind
Karl August Wittfogel: Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations
Peter Wollen (Editor): On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: Situationist International, 1957-1972
Stefan Zweig: A World of Yesterday
