The 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the Century
Published in 1995 by National Review in response to the upcoming 100 best non-fiction books of the century by Random House. Created with input from a panel of contributors to the magazine, authors and historians.
- 1
The Second World War
Winston Churchill · 1948 · 3 lists
- 2
The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1973 · 5 lists
- 3
Homage to Catalonia
George Orwell · 1938 · 3 lists
- 4
The Road to Serfdom
Friedrich von Hayek · 1944 · 3 lists
- 5
Collected Essays of George Orwell
George Orwell · 1968 · 1 list
- 6
The Open Society and Its Enemies
Karl Popper · 1945 · 2 lists
- 7
The Abolition of Man
C.S. Lewis · 1943 · 1 list
- 8
The Revolt of the Masses
José Ortega y Gasset · 1929 · 1 list
- 9
The Constitution of Liberty
Friedrich A. Hayek · 1960 · 1 list
- 10
Capitalism and Freedom
Milton Friedman · 1962 · 2 lists
- 11
Modern Times
Paul Johnson · 1983 · 1 list
- 12
Rationalism in Politics
Michael Oakeshott · 1962 · 1 list
- 13
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
Joseph A. Schumpeter · 1942 · 1 list
- 14
Economy and Society
Max Weber · 1978 · 1 list
- 15
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Hannah Arendt · 1951 · 2 lists
- 16
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Rebecca West · 1941 · 3 lists
- 17
Sociobiology
E. O. Wilson · 1975 · 1 list
- 18
Centesimus Annus
Pope John Paul II · 1991 · 1 list
- 19
The Pursuit of the Millennium
Norman Cohn · 1961 · 1 list
- 20
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank · 1947 · 10 lists
- 21
The Great Terror
Robert Conquest · 1968 · 1 list
- 22
Chronicles of Wasted Time
Malcolm Muggeridge · 1972 · 1 list
- 23
Relativity
Albert Einstein · 1925 · 4 lists
- 24
Witness
Whittaker Chambers · 1937 · 2 lists
- 25
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Thomas Kuhn · 1962 · 5 lists
- 26
Mere Christianity
C.S. Lewis · 1952 · 1 list
- 27
The Quest for Community
Robert Nisbet · 1953 · 1 list
- 28
Encyclopedia Britannica
Encyclopedia Britannica · 1910 · 2 lists
- 29
Up in the Old Hotel
Joseph Mitchell · 1992 · 1 list
- 30
The Everlasting Man
G.K. Chesterton · 1925 · 1 list
- 31
Orthodoxy
G.K. Chesterton · 1908 · 1 list
- 32
The Liberal Imagination
Lionel Trilling · 1950 · 2 lists
- 33
The Double Helix
James D. Watson · 1968 · 6 lists
- 34
The Feynman Lectures on Physics
Richard P. Feynman · 1964 · 2 lists
- 35
Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Tom Wolfe · 1970 · 1 list
- 36
The Myth of Sisyphus
Albert Camus · 1942 · 1 list
- 37
The Unheavenly City
Edward C. Banfield · 1974 · 1 list
- 38
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud · 2018 · 10 lists
- 39
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs · 1961 · 2 lists
- 40
The End of History and the Last Man
Francis Fukuyama · 1992 · 2 lists
- 41
- 42
The Age of Reform
Richard Hofstadter · 1955 · 2 lists
- 43
- 44
God and Man at Yale
William F. Buckley, Jr · 1951 · 1 list
- 45
Selected Essays of T. S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot · 1950 · 1 list
- 46
Ideas Have Consequences
Richard M. Weaver · 1948 · 1 list
- 47
The Economy of Cities
Jane Jacobs · 1969 · 1 list
- 48
The Closing of the American Mind
Allan Bloom · 1987 · 1 list
- 49
Ethnic America
Thomas Sowell · 1981 · 1 list
- 50
An American Dilemma
Gunnar Myrdal · 1944 · 2 lists
- 51
Three Case Histories
Sigmund Freud · 1963 · 1 list
- 52
The Struggle for Europe
Chester Wilmot · 1952 · 1 list
- 53
Main Currents in American Thought
Vernon L. Parrington · 1987 · 2 lists
- 54
The Waning of the Middle Ages
Johan Huizinga · 1919 · 1 list
- 55
Systematic Theology
Wolfhart Pannenberg · 1985 · 1 list
- 56
The Campaign of the Marne
Sewell Tyng · 2007 · 1 list
- 57
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Ludwig Wittgenstein · 1921 · 1 list
- 58
Insight
Bernard Lonergan · 1957 · 1 list
- 59
Being and Time
Martin Heidegger · 1927 · 2 lists
- 60
Disraeli
Robert Blake · 1966 · 1 list
- 61
Democracy and Leadership
Irving Babbitt · 1924 · 1 list
- 62
The Elements of Style
E. B. White, William Strunk Jr. · 1920 · 3 lists
- 63
The Machiavellians
James Burnham · 1943 · 2 lists
- 64
- 65
The Hedgehog and the Fox
Isaiah Berlin · 1901 · 1 list
- 66
Roll, Jordan, Roll
Eugene Genovese · 1974 · 1 list
- 67
The ABC of Reading
Ezra Pound · 1934 · 1 list
- 68
Second World War
John Keegan · 1989 · 1 list
- 69
The Making of Homeric Verse
Milman Parry · 1971 · 1 list
- 70
The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling
Angus Wilson · 1977 · 1 list
- 71
Scrutiny
F. R. Leavis · 1953 · 1 list
- 72
The Edge of the Sword
Charles de Gaulle · 1960 · 1 list
- 73
R. E. Lee
Douglas Southall Freeman · 1934 · 2 lists
- 74
Bureaucracy
Ludwig von Mises · 1944 · 1 list
- 75
The Seven Storey Mountain
Thomas Merton · 1948 · 2 lists
- 76
Balzac
Stefan Zweig · 1946 · 1 list
- 77
The Good Society
Walter Lippmann · 1943 · 1 list
- 78
Silent Spring
Rachel Carson · 1962 · 9 lists
- 79
The Christian Tradition
Jaroslav Pelikan · 1971 · 1 list
- 80
Strange Defeat
Marc Bloch · 1946 · 1 list
- 81
Looking Back
Norman Douglas · 1933 · 1 list
- 82
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
Henry Adams · 1904 · 1 list
- 83
Poetry and the Age
Randall Jarrell · 1953 · 1 list
- 84
Love in the Western World
Denis de Rougemont · 1940 · 1 list
- 85
The Conservative Mind
Russell Kirk · 1953 · 1 list
- 86
Wealth and Poverty
George Gilder · 1984 · 1 list
- 87
Battle Cry of Freedom
James M. McPherson · 1988 · 3 lists
- 88
Henry James
Leon Edel · 1931 · 3 lists
- 89
Essays of E. B. White
E. B. White · 1977 · 1 list
- 90
Speak, Memory
Vladimir Nabokov · 1951 · 3 lists
- 91
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
Tom Wolfe · 1968 · 3 lists
- 92
Darwin's Black Box
Michael J. Behe · 1996 · 1 list
- 93
The Civil War
Shelby Foote · 1958 · 3 lists
- 94
The Way the World Works
Jude Wanniski · 1978 · 1 list
- 95
To the Finland Station
Edmund Wilson · 1940 · 1 list
- 96
Civilisation
Kenneth M. Clark · 1 list
- 97
The Russian Revolution
Richard Pipes · 1990 · 1 list
- 98
The Idea of History
R.G. Collingwood · 1946 · 1 list
- 99
The Last Lion
William Manchester · 1983 · 1 list
- 100
The Starr Report
Kenneth W. Starr · 1 list
