What's the most influencial book of the last 20 years?
Each year, more than 15,000 academic books are published in North America. A scant few will reach beyond their core audience of disciplinary specialists. Fewer still will enter the public consciousness.
We invited scholars from across the academy to tell us what they saw as the most influential book published in the past 20 years. (Some respondents named books slightly outside our time frame, but we included them anyway.) We asked them to select books — academic or not, but written by scholars — from within or outside their own fields. It was up to our respondents to define “influential,” but we asked them to explain why they chose the books they did. Here are their answers.
Paul Bloom | Eric Klinenberg | Peniel Joseph | Johanna Hanink | Jackson Lears| Leon Botstein | Sheena Iyengar | Noliwe M. Rooks | G. Gabrielle Starr | Amy J. Binder | Susan J. Douglas | Mari Matsuda | Steven Shapin | Mark Greif | Ashley Farmer | Nakul Krishna | Richard Delgado | Jonathan Holloway | John L. Jackson | Deborah Tannen | Amitava Kumar
The Case for a Better World
To be taken seriously as the “most influential book” written by an academic, a work has to transform the way many of us make sense of the world, and so has to have influence beyond a narrow circle of scholars. If the average reader of The Chronicle Review has never heard of a book, it shouldn’t be a contender. Ideally, then, the candidates would be like On the Origin of Species or Das Kapital or The Interpretation of Dreams. But those books were written more than 100 years ago, and none by an academic. Moving down a tier, there is Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures and Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. Superb and influential books, but written many decades ago.
Maybe influential books of this sort don’t exist anymore. Or maybe we can identify only those books that really have had a major influence after enough time has elapsed; if you’re interested in 1998-2018, ask again in 50 years.
Each year, more than 15,000 academic books are published in North America. A scant few will reach beyond their core audience of disciplinary specialists. Fewer still will enter the public consciousness.
We invited scholars from across the academy to tell us what they saw as the most influential book published in the past 20 years. (Some respondents named books slightly outside our time frame, but we included them anyway.) We asked them to select books — academic or not, but written by scholars — from within or outside their own fields. It was up to our respondents to define “influential,” but we asked them to explain why they chose the books they did. Here are their answers.Paul Bloom | Eric Klinenberg | Peniel Joseph | Johanna Hanink | Jackson Lears| Leon Botstein | Sheena Iyengar | Noliwe M. Rooks | G. Gabrielle Starr | Amy J. Binder | Susan J. Douglas | Mari Matsuda | Steven Shapin | Mark Greif | Ashley Farmer | Nakul Krishna | Richard Delgado | Jonathan Holloway | John L. Jackson | Deborah Tannen | Amitava Kumar
The Case for a Better World
To be taken seriously as the “most influential book” written by an academic, a work has to transform the way many of us make sense of the world, and so has to have influence beyond a narrow circle of scholars. If the average reader of The Chronicle Review has never heard of a book, it shouldn’t be a contender. Ideally, then, the candidates would be like On the Origin of Species or Das Kapital or The Interpretation of Dreams. But those books were written more than 100 years ago, and none by an academic. Moving down a tier, there is Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures and Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. Superb and influential books, but written many decades ago.
Maybe influential books of this sort don’t exist anymore. Or maybe we can identify only those books that really have had a major influence after enough time has elapsed; if you’re interested in 1998-2018, ask again in 50 years.
by Paul Bloom, Chronicle of Higher Education | Read more:
Image: Lincoln Agnew
[ed. One shocking omission: The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein.]
