Forgive me for posting this so late, but I just ran across a list titled “The Most Harmful Books of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century” compiled by the masterminds over at Human Events – the same right-wing blog which publishes noted manly authority Nathanael Blake, who last year criticized male Virginia Tech students who, in one classroom attacked by gunman Seung-Hui Cho, ducked for cover instead of rushing Cho head-on despite him being armed with two semi-automatic pistols.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been irritated by self-righteous strangers who try to tell me what I can and cannot read, or what film I can or cannot see. And while the collectors of the following list do not specifically say “Do not read this book,” the fact that they call any text damaging (beyond, say, the NAMBLA Manifesto) is imbecilic considering that no text is good or evil on its face.
Rather, it depends on how the person who reads it interprets the information a la The Bible or The Koran.
Anyhow, the list (click here for the surly details) contains various political texts (Marx, Hitler, Mao), but perhaps not surprisingly also includes “The Kinsey Report” (which first introduced Americans to sex), plus titles by Neitzsche (“The Nazis loved [him]” the list claims), and those old right-wing scarecrows: Freud, Freidan, Mead, Mill, Foucault, Nader, and Charles Darwin.
Why JK Rowling and JD Salinger’s “Catcher In the Rye” were not also included on the list is something I can only chalk up to sloppy academic thinking.
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