Below is a list of the 50 most important books of the last half century. These books have affected our culture in many ways and shape the way we live and think.
1. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
2. Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
3. Robert Atkins’ Dr Atkins’s New Diet Revolution
4. Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion
5. Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind
6. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code
7. Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
8. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
9. Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures
10. Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People
11. Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box
12. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel
13. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose
14. Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning
15. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique
16. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom
17. Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence
18. Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man
19. John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
20. Alex Haley’s Roots
21. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time
22. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
23. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
24. Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People
25. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
26. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude
27. Alasdair McIntyre’s After Virtue
28. Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved
29. Abdul Rahman Munif’s Cities of Salt
30. Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed
31. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks’ The 9/11 Commission Report
32. Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind
33. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
34. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice
35. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series
36. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
37. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos
38. Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation
39. Amartya Sen’s Resources, Values and Development
40. B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity
41. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago
42. Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capitalism
43. Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
44. Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan
45. Mao Tse-tung’s The Little Red Book, aka Quotations From Chairman Mao
46. Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life
47. James D. Watson’s The Double Helix
48. E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology
49. Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X
50. Muhammad Yunus’ Banker to the Poor
Source: 50 Most Influential Books of the Last 50 (or so) Years
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