Cissy got a Chinese-language book from the library about the ten worst (in terms of negative impact on the world) books ever. Skipping through the table of contents, I noticed that it covers thirteen. Cissy could not offer an explanation for this, and I had not even heard of some of the titles, so I turned to Amazon to find out more. The book is a translation of an American book published in 2008, entitled 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help. That would make fifteen.

The author, Benjamin Wiker, is a member of a religious fundamentalist think tank, and the customer reviews for his book on Amazon are part of the heated and ongoing creation-vs-evolution controversy in the United States, and as such completely useless as a quality indicator for the work: There is an even split between one-star and five-star reviews, with pretty much nothing in between, the comments on both sides are mostly just attacks on or praise for the author and the two camps, with no clear indication that the book itself has informed them at all.

So here is Wiker's list of fifteen:

• Machiavelli - The Prince (1513)
• Descartes - Discourse on Method (1637)
• Hobbes - Leviathan (1651)
• Rousseau - Discourse on Inequality (1755)
• Marx - Communist Manifesto (1848)
• Mill - Utilitarianism (1863)
• Darwin - The Descent of Man (1871)
• Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
• Lenin - The State and Revolution (1917)
• Sanger - The Pivot of Civilization (1922)
• Hitler - Mein Kampf (1925)
• Freud - Future of an Illusion (1927)
• Mead - Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)
• Kinsey - Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)
• Friedan - The Feminine Mystique (1963)

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to guess why two of them did not make it into the Chinese edition.