Hi, everyone. I thought it would be informational and interesting for people to know these two lists of the top one hundred non-fiction books of the last century. The first list is the Modern Library's (which is, politically speaking, 'center-left') and the second list is from a panel of editors chosen by the National Review Magazine (and is 'center-right' politically).

First The Modern Library's Top 100 Non-fiction Books of the 20th Century:

1. THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS by Henry Adams
   
2. THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE by William James
   
3. UP FROM SLAVERY by Booker T. Washington
   
4. A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN by Virginia Woolf
   
5. SILENT SPRING by Rachel Carson
   
6. SELECTED ESSAYS, 1917-1932 by T. S. Eliot
   
7. THE DOUBLE HELIX by James D. Watson
   
8. SPEAK, MEMORY by Vladimir Nabokov
   
9. THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE by H. L. Mencken
   
10. THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY by John Maynard Keynes
    
11. THE LIVES OF A CELL by Lewis Thomas
    
12. THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY by Frederick Jackson Turner
    
13. BLACK BOY by Richard Wright
    
14. ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL by E. M. Forster
    
15. THE CIVIL WAR by Shelby Foote
    
16. THE GUNS OF AUGUST by Barbara Tuchman
    
17. THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND by Isaiah Berlin
    
18. THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN by Reinhold Niebuhr
    
19. NOTES OF A NATIVE SON by James Baldwin
    
20. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS by Gertrude Stein
    
21. THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE by William Strunk and E. B. White
    
22. AN AMERICAN DILEMMA by Gunnar Myrdal
    
23. PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell
    
24. THE MISMEASURE OF MAN by Stephen Jay Gould
    
25. THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP by Meyer Howard Abrams
    
26. THE ART OF THE SOLUBLE by Peter B. Medawar
    
27. THE ANTS by Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson
    
28. A THEORY OF JUSTICE by John Rawls
    
29. ART AND ILLUSION by Ernest H. Gombrich
    
30. THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS by E. P. Thompson
    
31. THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK by W.E.B. Du Bois
    
32. PRINCIPIA ETHICA by G. E. Moore
    
33. PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION by John Dewey
    
34. ON GROWTH AND FORM by D'Arcy Thompson
    
35. IDEAS AND OPINIONS by Albert Einstein
    
36. THE AGE OF JACKSON, Arthur Schlesinger by Jr.
    
37. THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB by Richard Rhodes
    
38. BLACK LAMB and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
    
39. AUTOBIOGRAPHIES by W. B. Yeats
    
40. SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN CHINA by Joseph Needham
    
41. GOODBYE TO ALL THAT by Robert Graves
    
42. HOMAGE TO CATALONIA by George Orwell
    
43. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN by Mark Twain
    
44. CHILDREN OF CRISIS by Robert Coles
    
45. A STUDY OF HISTORY by Arnold J. Toynbee
    
46. THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY by John Kenneth Galbraith
    
47. PRESENT AT THE CREATION by Dean Acheson
    
48. THE GREAT BRIDGE by David McCullough
    
49. PATRIOTIC GORE by Edmund Wilson
    
50. SAMUEL JOHNSON by Walter Jackson Bate
    
51. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X
    
52. THE RIGHT STUFF by Tom Wolfe
    
53. EMINENT VICTORIANS by Lytton Strachey
    
54. WORKING by Studs Terkel
    
55. DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Styron
    
56. THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION by Lionel Trilling
    
57. THE SECOND WORLD WAR by Winston Churchill
    
58. OUT OF AFRICA by Isak Dinesen
    
59. JEFFERSON AND HIS TIME by Dumas Malone
    
60. IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN by William Carlos Williams
    
61. CADILLAC DESERT by Marc Reisner
    
62. THE HOUSE OF MORGAN by Ron Chernow
    
63. THE SWEET SCIENCE by A. J. Liebling
    
64. THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES by Karl Popper
    
65. THE ART OF MEMORY by Frances A. Yates
    
66. RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM by R. H. Tawney
    
67. A PREFACE TO MORALS by Walter Lippmann
    
68. THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE by Jonathan D. Spence
    
69. THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS by Thomas S. Kuhn
    
70. THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW by C. Vann Woodward
    
71. THE RISE OF THE WEST by William H. McNeill
    
72. THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS by Elaine Pagels
    
73. JAMES JOYCE by Richard Ellmann
    
74. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE by Cecil Woodham-Smith
    
75. THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell
    
76. THE CITY IN HISTORY by Lewis Mumford
    
77. BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM by James M. McPherson
    
78. WHY WE CAN'T WAIT by Martin Luther King</B> by Jr.
    
79. THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT by Edmund Morris
    
80. STUDIES IN ICONOLOGY by Erwin Panofsky
    
81. THE FACE OF BATTLE by John Keegan
    
82. THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND by George Dangerfield
    
83. VERMEER by Lawrence Gowing
    
84. A BRIGHT SHINING LIE by Neil Sheehan
    
85. WEST WITH THE NIGHT by Beryl Markham
    
86. THIS BOY'S LIFE by Tobias Wolff
    
87. A MATHEMATICIAN'S APOLOGY by G. H. Hardy
    
88. SIX EASY PIECES by Richard P. Feynman
    
89. PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK by Annie Dillard
    
90. THE GOLDEN BOUGH by James George Frazer
    
91. SHADOW AND ACT by Ralph Ellison
    
92. THE POWER BROKER by Robert A. Caro
    
93. THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION by Richard Hofstadter
    
94. THE CONTOURS OF AMERICAN HISTORY by William Appleman Williams
    
95. THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE by Herbert Croly
    
96. IN COLD BLOOD by Truman Capote
    
97. THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER by Janet Malcolm
    
98. THE TAMING OF CHANCE by Ian Hacking
    
99. OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS by Anne Lamott
    
100. MELBOURNE by Lord David Cecil
     

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And here is the National Review's list (the quotes next to the book titles are from the panel members):


1. The Second World War, Winston S. Churchill
Brookhiser: "The big story of the century, told by its major hero."
Vol. 1, The Gathering Storm
Vol. 2, Their Finest Hour
Vol. 3, The Grand Alliance
Vol. 4, The Hinge of Fate
Vol. 5, Closing the Ring
Vol. 6, Triumph and Tragedy


2. The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
Neuhaus: "Marked the absolute final turning point beyond which nobody could deny the evil of the Evil Empire."

3. Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell
Herman: "Orwell's masterpiece-far superior to Animal Farm and 1984. No education in the meaning of the 20th century is complete without it."

4. The Road to Serfdom, F. A. von Hayek
Helprin: "Shatters the myth that the totalitarianisms 'of the Left' and 'of the Right' stem from differing impulses."

5. Collected Essays, George Orwell
King: "Every conservative's favorite liberal and every liberal's favorite conservative. This book has no enemies."

6. The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper
Herman: "The best work on political philosophy in the 20th century. Exposes totalitarianism's roots in Plato, Hegel, and Marx."

7. The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis
Brookhiser: "How modern philosophies drain meaning and the sacred from our lives."

8. Revolt of the Masses, Jos? Ortega y Gasset
Gilder: "Prophesied the 20th century's debauchery of democracy and science, the barbarism of the specialist, and the inevitable fatuity of public opinion. Explained the genius of capitalist elites."

9. The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. von Hayek
O'Sullivan: "A great re-statement for this century of classical liberalism by its greatest modern exponent."

10. Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman

11. Modern Times, Paul Johnson
Herman: "Huge impact outside the academy, dreaded and ignored inside it."

12. Rationalism in Politics, Michael Oakeshott
Herman: "Oakeshott is the 20th century's Edmund Burke."

13. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Joseph A. Schumpeter
Caldwell: "Locus classicus for the observation that democratic capitalism undermines itself through its very success."

14. Economy and Society, Max Weber
Lind: "Weber made permanent contributions to the understanding of society with his discussions of comparative religion, bureaucracy, charisma, and the distinctions among status, class, and party."

15. The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt
Caldwell: "Through Nazism and Stalinism, looks at almost every pernicious trend in the last century's politics with stunning subtlety."

16. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West
Kelly: "For its writing, not for its historical accuracy."

17. Sociobiology, Edward O. Wilson
Lind: "Darwin put humanity in its proper place in the animal kingdom. Wilson put human society there, too."

18. Centissimus Annus, Pope John Paul II

19. The Pursuit of the Millennium, Norman Cohn
Neuhaus: "The authoritative refutation of utopianism of the left, right, and points undetermined."

20. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
Helprin: "An innocent's account of the greatest evil imaginable. The most powerful book of the century. Others may not agree. No matter, I cast my lot with this child."
Caldwell: "If one didn't know her fate, one might read it as the reflections of any girl. That one does know her fate makes this as close to a holy book as the century produced."

21. The Great Terror, Robert Conquest
Herman: "Documented for the first time the real record of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. A genuine monument of historical research and reconstruction, a true epic of evil."

22. Chronicles of Wasted Time, Malcolm Muggeridge
Gilder: "The best autobiography, Christian confession, and historic meditation of the century."

23. Relativity, Albert Einstein
Lind: "The most important physicist since Newton."

24. Witness, Whittaker Chambers
Caldwell: "Confession, history, potboiler-by a man who writes like the literary giant we would know him as, had not Communism got him first."

25. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn

26. Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis
Neuhaus: "The most influential book of the most influential Christian apologist of the century."

27. The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet

28. Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed.
Helprin: "The infinite riches of the world, presented with elegance, confidence, and economy."

29. Up in the Old Hotel, Joseph Mitchell

30. The Everlasting Man, G. K. Chesterton
Lukacs: "A great carillonade of Christian verities."

31. Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton
O'Sullivan: "How to look at the Christian tradition with fresh eyes."

32. The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling
Hart: "The popular form of liberalism tends to simplify and caricature when it attempts moral aspiration-that is, it tends to 'Stalinism.'"

33. The Double Helix, James D. Watson
Herman: "Deeply hated by feminists because Watson dares to suggest that the male-female distinction originated in nature, in the DNA code itself."

34. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Richard Phillips Feynman
Gelernter: "Outside of art (or maybe not), physics is mankind's most beautiful achievement; these three volumes are probably the most beautiful ever written about physics."

35. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, Tom Wolfe
O'Sullivan: "Wolfe is our Juvenal."

36. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Albert Camus

37. The Unheavenly City, Edward C. Banfield
Neuhaus: "The volume that began the debunking of New Deal socialism and its public-policy consequences."

38. The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud

39. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

40. The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama

41. Joy of Cooking, Irma S. Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, and Ethan Becker

42. The Age of Reform, Richard Hofstadter
Herman: "The single best book on American history in this century, bar none."

43. The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes
Hart: "Influential in suggesting that the business cycle can be modified by government investment and manipulation of tax rates."

44. God & Man at Yale, William F. Buckley Jr.
Gilder: "Still correct and prophetic. It defines the conservative revolt against socialism and atheism on campus and in the culture, and reconciles the alleged conflict between capitalist and religious conservatives."

45. Selected Essays, T. S. Eliot
Hart: "Shaped the literary taste of the mid-century."

46. Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver

47. The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs

48. The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom

49. Ethnic America, Thomas Sowell

50. An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal
An American Dilemma, Vol. 1
An American Dilemma, Vol. 2

51. Three Case Histories, Sigmund Freud
Gelernter: "Beyond question Freud is history's most important philosopher of the mind, and he ranks alongside Eliot as the century's greatest literary critic. Modern intellectual life (left, right, and in-between) would be unthinkable without him."

52. The Struggle for Europe, Chester Wilmot

53. Main Currents in American Thought, Vernon Louis Parrington
King: "An immensely readable history of ideas and men. (Skip the fragmentary third volume-he died before finishing it.)"

54. The Waning of the Middle Ages, Johann Huzinga
Lukacs: "Probably the finest historian who lived in this century. "
55. Systematic Theology, Wolfhart Pannenberg
Neuhaus: "The best summary and reflection on Christianity's encounter with the Enlightenment project."
Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
Systematic Theology, Vol. 2
Systematic Theology, Vol. 3

56. The Campaign of the Marne, Sewell Tyng
Keegan: "A forgotten American's masterly account of the First World War in the West."

57. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Hart: "A terse summation of the analytic method of the analytic school in philosophy, and a heroic leap beyond it."

58. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Bernard Lonergan
Glendon: "The Thomas Aquinas of the 20th century."

59. Being and Time, Martin Heidegger
Hart: "A seminal thinker, notwithstanding his disgraceful error of equating National Socialism with the experience of 'Being.'"

60. Disraeli, Robert Blake
Keegan: "Political biography as it should be written."

61. Democracy and Leadership, Irving Babbitt
King: "A conservative literary critic describes what happens when humanitarianism over takes humanism."

62. The Elements of Style, William Strunk & E. B. White
A. Thernstrom: "If only every writer would remember just one of Strunk & White's wonderful injunctions: 'Omit needless words.' Omit needless words."

63. The Machiavellians, James Burnham
O'Sullivan: "Burnham is the greatest political analyst of our century and this is his best book."

64. Reflections of a Russian Statesman, Konstantin P. Pobedonostsev
King: "The 'culture war' as seen by the tutor to the last two czars. A Russian Pat Buchanan."

65. The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin

66. Roll, Jordan, Roll, Eugene D. Genovese
Neuhaus: "The best account of American slavery and the moral and cultural forces that undid it."

67. The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound
Brookhiser: "An epitome of the aging aesthetic movement that will be forever known as modernism."

68. The Second World War, John Keegan
Hart: "A masterly history in a single volume."

69. The Making of Homeric Verse, Milman Parry
Lind: "Genuine discoveries in literary study are rare. Parry's discovery of the oral formulaic basis of the Homeric epics, the founding texts of Western literature, was one of them."

70. The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling, Angus Wilson
Keegan: "A life of a great author told through the transmutation of his experience into fictional form."

71. Scrutiny, F. R. Leavis
Hart: "Enormously important in education, especially in England. Leavis understood what one kind of 'living English' is."

72. The Edge of the Sword, Charles de Gaulle
Brookhiser: "A lesser figure than Churchill, but more philosophical (and hence, more problematic)."

73. R. E. Lee, Douglas Southall Freeman
Conquest: "The finest work on the Civil War."

74. Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises

75. The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton
Neuhaus: "A classic conversion story of a modern urban sophisticate."

76. Balzac, Stefan Zweig
King: "On the joys of working one's self to death. The chapter 'Black Coffee' is a masterpiece of imaginative reconstruction."

77. The Good Society, Walter Lippmann
Gilder: "Written during the Great Depression. A corruscating defense of the morality of capitalism."

78. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
Lind: "For all the excesses of the environmental movement, the realization that human technology can permanently damage the earth's environment marked a great advance in civilization. Carson's book, more than any other, publicized this message."

79. The Christian Tradition, Jaroslav Pelikan
Neuhaus: "The century's most comprehensive account of Christian teaching from the second century on."

80. Strange Defeat, Marc Bloch
Herman: "A great historian's personal account of the fall of France in 1940."

81. Looking Back, Norman Douglas
Conquest: "Fascinating memoirs of a remarkable writer."

82. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams

83. Poetry and the Age, Randall Jarrell
Caldwell: "The book for showing how 20th- century poets think, what their poetry does, and why it matters."

84. Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont
Brookhiser: "What has become of eros over the last seven centuries."

85. The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk

86. Wealth and Poverty, George Gilder

87. Battle Cry of Freedom, James M. McPherson

88. Henry James, Leon Edel
King: "All the James you want without having to read him."

89. Essays of E. B. White, E. B. White
Gelernter: "White is the apotheosis of the American liberal now spurned and detested by the Left (and the cultural mainstream). His mesmerized devotion to the objects of his affection-his family, the female sex, his farm, the English language, Manhattan, the sea, America, Maine, and freedom, in descending order-is movingly absolute."

90. Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov

91. The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe

92. Darwin's Black Box, Michael J. Behe
Gilder: "Overthrows Darwin at the end of the 20th century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning."
93. The Civil War, Shelby Foote

94. The Way the World Works, Jude Wanniski
Gilder: "The best book on economics. Shows fatuity of still-dominant demand-side model, with its silly preoccupation with accounting trivia, like the federal budget and trade balance and savings rates, in an economy with $40 trillion or so in assets that rise and fall weekly by trillions."

95. To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson
Herman: "The best single book on Karl Marx and Marx's place in modern history."

96. Civilisation, Kenneth Clark

97. The Russian Revolution, Richard Pipes

98. The Idea of History, R. G. Collingwood

99. The Last Lion, William Manchester
Last Lion: William Spencer Churchill: Vol. 1 Visions of Glory, 1874-1932
Last Lion: William Spencer Churchill: Vol. 2 Alone, 1932-1940

100. The Starr Report, Kenneth W. Starr
Hart: "A study in human depravity."