You've heard of the "Great Books"?

These are their evil opposites. From Machiavelli's The Prince to Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto to Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, family breakdown, and disastrous social experiments. And yet these authors' bad ideas are still popular and pervasive--in fact, they might influence your own thinking without your realizing it. Here with the antidote is Professor Benjamin Wiker. In his scintillating new book, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World (And 5 Others That Didn't Help), he seizes each of these evil books by its malignant heart and exposes it to the light of day. In this witty, learned, and provocative exposé, you'll learn:

* Why Machiavelli's The Prince was the inspiration for a long list of tyrannies (Stalin had it on his nightstand) 
* How Descartes' Discourse on Method "proved" God's existence only by making Him a creation of our own ego 
* How Hobbes' Leviathan led to the belief that we have a "right" to whatever we want 
* Why Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto could win the award for the most malicious book ever written 
* How Darwin's The Descent of Man proves he intended "survival of the fittest" to be applied to human society 
* How Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil issued the call for a world ruled solely by the "will to power" 
* How Hitler's Mein Kampf was a kind of "spiritualized Darwinism" that accounts for his genocidal anti-Semitism 
* How the pansexual paradise described in Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa turned out to be a creation of her own sexual confusions and aspirations 
* Why Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was simply autobiography masquerading as science

Witty, shocking, and instructive, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World offers a quick education on the worst ideas in human history--and how we can avoid them in the future.

"Benjamin Wiker has read the worst books in Western civilization so you don't have to. In this sprightly, witty, engaging survey of bad guys ranging from Marx to Hitler, Nietzsche to Betty Friedan, Professor Wiker's poison pen portraits are great critical aids to analyzing some of the worst ideas that have ever contaminated Western civilization. Professor Wiker recommends actually reading the books--but his own book is a whole lot more fun."--THOMAS E. WOODS, JR., PH.D. author of How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization