 | List of controversial non-fiction books: Encyclopedia - List of controversial non-fiction books
List of controversial non-fiction books
This is a list of controversial non-fiction books aimed at the general reader which discuss controversial issues, or are (or were at the time of writing) controversial for other reasons. For controversial fictional books, see list of banned books. Additional books may be found at Controversial books.
This list is alphabetical by topic, and books should be ordered by publication date within topics
Criteria for inclusion:
- This list is intended to be selective, not exhaustive.
- The standard for books written in the last 40 years is necessarily weaker than that for older books, as there is no way of knowing whether these books will be as highly regarded (or reviled) in the decades to come. Their topical nature makes them important, and so they should be included here.
- verifiable references for the existence and size of the controversy must be provided
List of controversial non-fiction books - Agriculture
- 1940: An Agricultural Testament by Sir Albert Howard
List of controversial issues, List of banned books
List of controversial non-fiction books - Anthropology
- 1928: Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
- 1997: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
- 2000: Darkness in El Dorado by Patrick Tierney
List of controversial non-fiction books - Artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness
- 1976: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
- 1986: The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky
- 1990: The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose
- 1991: Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett
- 2000: The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil
List of controversial non-fiction books - Astronomy
- 1543: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Nicolaus Copernicus
- 1632: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei
List of controversial non-fiction books - Business and bureaucracy
- 1969: The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peter
List of controversial non-fiction books - Cosmology
- 1986: The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler
- 1987: Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies by Halton Arp
- 1998: Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology, and Academic Science by Halton Arp
- 2002: A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
List of controversial non-fiction books - Drug culture
- 1967: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
- 1991: PiHKAL by Alexander Shulgin
List of controversial non-fiction books - Environmentalism
- 1798: An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus
Malthus promoted a view of the lower classes as being an economic burden rather than a resource, and predicted that their population growth could lead to catastrophic food shortages. This adversely affected British social legislation at the time, but also prompted the first census, inspired movements promoting contraception, and contributed to both Darwin and Wallace's formulation of a theory of natural selection.
- 1962: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
This book popularized environmentalism by exposing to the public the dangers of chemical pesticides, and accusing the chemical industry of unethical behavior. This led to a subsequent ban of the pesticide DDT, however some claim that this ban is responsible for a worldwide resurgence in malaria and millions of human deaths.
- 1968: The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich
- 1972: The Limits to Growth; A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind
- 1981: The Ultimate Resource by Julian Simon
- 2001: The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg
- The Peak Of World Oil Production And The Road To The Olduvai Gorge by Richard C. Duncan
List of controversial non-fiction books - Evolution
- 1859: The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Darwin put forth a theory of natural selection, which contradicted the doctrine of "created kinds" which was derived from a literal reading of the Book of Genesis.
- 1972: The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan
Morgan's Aquatic ape hypothesis challenges the theory that early humans evolved on the savannah, and argues that several human characteristics which are uncommon to mammals can be better explained by a semi-aquatic environment. The book is popular among feminists because it emphasizes the role of reproductive traits in human evolution.
- 1976: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- 1995: Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett
- 1996: Darwin's Black Box by Michael J. Behe
- 2000: Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells
List of controversial non-fiction books - Feminist theory
- 1970: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
List of controversial non-fiction books - Futurology
- 1970: Future Shock by Alvin Toffler
- 1982: Megatrends by John Naisbitt
- 2003: Our Final Hour (UK title: Our Final Century) by Martin Rees
List of controversial non-fiction books - Globalization
- 1968: War and Peace in the Global Village by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore
- 2000: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies by Naomi Klein
- 2002: World on Fire:How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability by Amy Chua
List of controversial non-fiction books - History
- 1973: The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- 1976: The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur R. Butz
- 1985: From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters
- 1987: Black Athena (volume I) by Martin Bernal
- 1991: Hindu Temples - What Happened to Them by Sita Ram Goel
- 1992: The End of History by Francis Fukuyama
- 1993: Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust by Kevin Annett
- 1994: Empirico-Statistical Analysis of Narrative Material and Its Applications to Historical Dating: The Development of the Statistical Tools by Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko
- 1996: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington
- 1996: Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen
- 1997: The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
- 1998: Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud by Arun Shourie
- 1999: New Methods of Statistical Analysis of Historical Texts: Applications to Chronology by Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko
- 2005: Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
List of controversial non-fiction books - Media
- 1954: Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham
- 1957: The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
- 1964: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan
- 1967: The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore
- 1977: Mass-Mediated Culture by Michael R. Real
- 1985: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
- 1988: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman
- 2002: Hollywood and Big Tobacco
List of controversial non-fiction books - Philosophy of science
- 1959: The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Logik der Forschung) by Karl Popper
Popper refuted the classical observationalist-inductivist account of science, and put forth falsifiability as a criterion of demarcation for proper scientific theories.
- 1962: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Kuhn reformulated the conception of scientific progress, resisting the formalization of a "scientific method", arguing instead that scientific theories are accepted and rejected based on their expalanatory power within their historical context. He coined the term "paradigm shift" to describe this process. Postmodernists interpret the book as undermining the scientific establishment, but Kuhn himself was a firm believer in scientific progress.
- 1975: Against Method by Paul Feyerabend
Feyerabend advocated theoretical anarchism, arguing that many instances of scientific progress have violated established criterion for "good science". Falsificationism and consistency he claims, as well as any methodology, will limit science, and thus "anything goes" is the best ideology.
List of controversial non-fiction books - Politics
- 1512: The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
- 1651: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
- 1791: The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
- 1848: The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
- 1925/1926: Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
- 1944: The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek
- 1951: The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
- 1960: On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn
- 1968: Coup D'État by Edward Luttwak
- 1970: The Islamic Declaration [1] by Alija Izetbegovic
- 2001: Stupid White Men by Michael Moore
- 2001: Democracy: The God That Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
- 2003: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken.
List of controversial non-fiction books - Psychiatry
- 1961: The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz
List of controversial non-fiction books - Race and intelligence
- 1981/1996: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
- 1994: The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray
- 2002: IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen
List of controversial non-fiction books - Religion
- 1793: Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason by Immanuel Kant
- 1795: The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
- 1950: Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard
- 1970: The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey
- 1982: Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln
- 1988: Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by John Shelby Spong
- 1997: The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin
List of controversial non-fiction books - Sociology
- The Bible
- The Koran
- 1948: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey
- 1953: Sexual Behavior in the Human Female by Alfred Kinsey
- 1956: The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills
- 1975: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E. O. Wilson
- 2002: Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex by Judith Levine
See also
- List of controversial issues
- List of banned books
Category: Lists of controversial books
Other related archives1512, 1543, 1632, 1651, 1791, 1793, 1795, 1798, 1848, 1859, 1925, 1926, 1928, 1940, 1944, 1948, 1950, 1951, 1953, 1954, 1956, 1957, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1981, 1982, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, A New Kind of Science, Adolf Hitler, Against Method, Agriculture, Al Franken, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Shulgin, Alfred Kinsey, Alija Izetbegovic, Alvin Toffler, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, An Agricultural Testament, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Anatoly Timofeevich Fomenko, Anthropology, Aquatic ape hypothesis, Artificial intelligence, Arun Shourie, Astronomy, Bjørn Lomborg, Black Athena, Book of Genesis, Business, C. Wright Mills, Charles Darwin, Charles Murray, Club of Rome, Coming of Age in Samoa, Consciousness Explained, Cosmology, Daniel Dennett, Daniel Goldhagen, Darkness in El Dorado, Darwin's Black Box, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, Democracy: The God That Failed, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Dianetics, Drug culture, E. O. Wilson, Edward Luttwak, Edward S. Herman, Elaine Morgan, Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, Environmentalism, Evolution, Feminist theory, Francis Fukuyama, Frank J. Tipler, Fredric Wertham, Friedrich A. Hayek, Friedrich Engels, From Time Immemorial, Future Shock, Futurology, Galileo Galilei, Germaine Greer, Globalization, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Hal Lindsey, Halton Arp, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, Henry Lincoln, Herman Kahn, Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust, Hindu Temples - What Happened to Them, History, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, Icons of Evolution, Immanuel Kant, Iris Chang, Jared Diamond, Joan Peters, John D. Barrow, John Naisbitt, John Shelby Spong, Jon Halliday, Jonathan Wells, Judith Levine, Julian Jaynes, Julian Simon, Jung Chang, Karl Marx, Karl Popper, L. Ron Hubbard, Laurence J. Peter, Leviathan, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, List of banned books, List of controversial issues, Lists of controversial books, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Mao: The Unknown Story, Margaret Mead, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Bernal, Martin Rees, Marvin Minsky, Media, Mein Kampf, Michael Baigent, Michael Drosnin, Michael J. Behe, Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, Neil Postman, Niccolo Machiavelli, Nicolaus Copernicus, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Noam Chomsky, Our Final Hour, Paul Feyerabend, Paul R. Ehrlich, Philosophy of science, PiHKAL, Politics, Postmodernists, Psychiatry, Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies, Quentin Fiore, Race and intelligence, Rachel Carson, Ray Kurzweil, Religion, Richard C. Duncan, Richard Dawkins, Richard J. Herrnstein, Richard Lynn, Roger Penrose, Samuel P. Huntington, Seduction of the Innocent, Silent Spring, Sir Albert Howard, Sita Ram Goel, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Sociology, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Wolfram, Stupid White Men, Tatu Vanhanen, The Age of Reason, The Age of Spiritual Machines, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, The Bell Curve, The Bible Code, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, The Communist Manifesto, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Emperor's New Mind, The End of History, The Female Eunuch, The Gulag Archipelago, The Hidden Persuaders, The Late, Great Planet Earth, The Limits to Growth, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, The Mismeasure of Man, The Myth of Mental Illness, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, The Origin of Species, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Peak Of World Oil Production And The Road To The Olduvai Gorge, The Peter Principle, The Population Bomb, The Power Elite, The Prince, The Rape of Nanking, The Rights of Man, The Road to Serfdom, The Selfish Gene, The Skeptical Environmentalist, The Society of Mind, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Kuhn, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Paine, Thomas Szasz, Tom Wolfe, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Vance Packard, World on Fire:How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, bureaucracy, consciousness, falsifiability, feminists, list of banned books, the classical observationalist-inductivist account of science
 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "List of controversial non-fiction books", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
