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CounterPunch

edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

CounterPunch's Favorite 100 Nonfiction Books
in Translation, Published in English Since 1900


Last year we compiled a list of our favorite 100 books of nonfiction first published in English in the 20th century. It generated much commentary and debate. So we've followed up with a similar list of nonfiction books in translation published in English since 1900. (Fiction, poetry and film lists will follow soon.) The titles are presented here in alphabetical order by author. In general, the rule was only one title per author. But we made two exceptions: for Foucault and Freud. Also some will note the inclusion of several books (I Ching, Marx, Krafft-Ebing) that were written prior to 1900. But our interest here is when they were published in English. Most of the books can be purchased online from amazon.com by simply clicking on the book's title or image. CounterPunch will receive a modest donation from the sale of any book purchased through the "channel" of our website. (Or visit other online bookshops, such as Powells.) Many of the books are out of print (a sad commentary in its own right). For those titles, we have provided a hyperlink to one of our favorite websites, Advanced Book Exchange. Commentary is welcome: Booktalk.

Click here for a text only version.

--Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair

The South Pole: an account of the Norwegian Antarctic expedition, 1910-1912
Roald Amundsen

 
Theater and Its Double
Antonin Artaud

 
Minima Moralia:
Reflections from a
Damaged Life

Theodor Adorno

 
The Hour of Our Death
Philippe Aries

 
Mimesis:
The Representation of Reality
in Western Literature

Erich Auerbach

 
The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard

 
Mythologies
Roland Barthes

 
Eroticism: death and sensuality
Georges Bataille

 
The Egyptian, Syrian,
and Iraqi Revolutions :
Some Observations on
Their Underlying Causes
and Social Character

Hanna Batatu 

 No Cover
Orson Welles: a critical view
Andre Bazin

 
Illuminations
Walter Benjamin

 
Black Elk Speaks
Black Elk

 
Feudal Society
Marc Bloch

 
Chinook Texts
Franz Boas
(Compiler and Translator)

 Out of Print
Other Inquisitions
Jorge Luis Borges

 
The Mediterranean
and the Mediterranean World
in the Age of Philip II

Fernand Braudel

 
The Development of an Aesthetic
Bertolt Brecht

 
Manifestoes of Surrealism
Andre Breton

 
The Evolution of Rock Art in the Caves of France
Abbe Henri Breuil

 No cover
My Last Sigh
Luis Bunuel

 
Homo Necans:
the Anthropology of
Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth

Walter Burkert

 
Man, Play and Games
Roger Caillois

 Out of Print
Political and Social Writings : 1961-1979 : Recommencing the Revolution : From Socialism to the Autonomous Society
Cornelius Castoriadis

 
Theory of Peasant Economy
Alexander V. Chayanov

 No Cover
Towards a New Architecture
Le Corbusier

 
Traditional French Cooking
Curnonsky

 Out of Print
Rebellion in the Backlands
Euclides da Cunha

 Out of Print
The Secret Life of Salvador Dali
Salvador Dali

 
The Second Sex
Simone De Beauvoir

 
The Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord

 
Of Grammatology
Jacques Derrida

 
Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology
Marcel Detienne

 
Stranglehold on Africa
Rene Dumont

 No Cover
Suicide: A Study in Sociology
Emile Durkheim

 
Film Form
Sergei Eisenstein

 
The Sacred and the Profane: the nature of religion
Mircea Eliade

 
The Civilizing Process
Norbert Elias

 
The Wretched of the Earth
Frantz Fanon

 
Architecture for the Poor : An Experiment in Rural Egypt
Hassan Fathy

 
History of Art
Elie Faure

 Out of Print
Discipline and Punish:
the birth of the prison

Michel Foucault

 
The History of Sexuality:
an introduction

Michel Foucault

 
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank

 
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Paulo Freire

 
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Sigmund Freud

 
Three Essays in the Theory of Sexuality
Sigmund Freud

 
The Dancing Bees:
an account of the life and senses of the honey bee

Karl von Frisch

 Out of Print
Reflections of Eden:
My Years with the
Orangutans of Borneo 

Birute Galdikas

 
Memories of Fire
Eduardo Galeano

 
Gandhi: An Autobiography : The Story of My ExperimentsWith Truth
Mohandas Gandhi

 
How We Won the War
Vo Nguyen Giap

 
Travels in the Congo
Andre Gide

 
Mechanization Takes Command
Sigfried Giedion

 Out of Print 
The Bog People:
Iron Age Man Preserved

P.V. Glob

 Out of Print
Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology
Andre Gorz

 No Cover
How New York Stole
the Idea of Modern Art

Serge Guilbaut

 Out of Print
Art and Illusion
Ernst Hans Gombrich

 
Prison Notebooks
Antonio Gramsci

 
Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956-58
Ernesto "Che" Guevara

 
A Theology of Liberation: history, politics and salvation
Gustavo Gutierrez

 
Seven Years in Tibet 
Heinrich Harrer

 
The Social History of Art
Arnold Hauser

 
Kon-Tiki
Thor Heyerdahl

 
This Sex Which Is Not One 
Luce Irigaray

 
Being and Time
Martin Heidegger

 
The Dialectic of Englightenment
Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno

 
Autumn of the Middle Ages
Johan Huizinga

 
The Gardens of Japan
Teiji Itoh

 
The Gnostic Religion
Hans Jonas

 
I Ching
(introduction by Carl Jung)

 
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Carl Jung

 
Kama-Sutra: Complete and Unexpurgated Translation
Alain Danielou (translator)

 
Kamapua'a:
The Hawai'ian Pig-God

Lilikala Kame'Eleihiwa 

 Out of Print
Shakespeare Our Contemporary
Jan Kott

 
Psychopathia Sexualis
Richard von Krafft-Ebing

 
The Conquest of Bread
Petr Kropotkin

 
Montaillou:
The Promised Land of Error

Emmanuel Le Roi Ladurie

 
The State and Revolution
Vladimir Lenin

 
The Coming of the French Revolution
Georges Lefebvre

 
Critique of Everyday Life
Henri Lefebvre

Out of Print 
The Broken Spears:
the Aztec Account
of the Conquest of Mexico

Miguel Leon-Portilla

 
Tristes Tropiques
Claude Levi-Strauss

 
Christ Stopped at Eboli: the story of a year
Carlo Levi

 
The Periodic Table
Primo Levi

 
Russia: an architecture
for world revolution

El Lissitsky

 Out of Print
Ornament and Crime
Adolf Loos

 
Man Meets Dog
Konrad Lorenz

 
History and Class Consciousness
Georg Lukacs

 No Cover
Lumumba Speaks: the Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba
Patrice Lumumba

No Cover 
Luxemburg Speaks
Rosa Luxemburg

 
The Diaries
Alma Mahler-Werfel

 No Cover
The Works of the People of Old : Na Hana a Ka Po'E Kahiko
Samuel Manaiakalani Kamakau

 No Cover
On Guerrilla Warfare
Mao Tse-Tung

 
Shadows of Tender Fury :
The Letters and Communiques of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation

Subcomandante Marcos

 No Cover
The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
Karl Marx 

 
The Gift: The Form and
Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies

Marcel Mauss

 
 I, Rigoberta Menchu : An Indian Woman in Guatemala
Rigoberta Menchu

 
Sense and Non-Sense
Maurice Merleau Ponty

 No Cover
A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900
Dmitry Svyatopolk Mirsky 

 
The Book of Five Rings
Miyamoto Musashi

 
Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy
Arne Naess

 
Behemoth:
the structure and practice of National Socialism 1933-44

Franz Neuman

 Out of Print
Hiroshima Notes
Kenzaburo Oe

 
Perspective As Symbolic Form
Erwin Panofsky

 
The Mind and Society
Vilfredo Pareto

 Out of Print
My Life and the Beautiful Game
Pelé
(Translated by Robt. Fish)

 
Morphology of the Folktale Vladimir Aioakovlevich Propp

 
Character Analysis
Wilhelm Reich

 
Renoir, My Father
Jean Renoir

 Out of Print
For a New Novel:
Essays on Fiction

Alain Robbe-Grillet

 No Cover
Memoirs from the
Women's Prison

Nawal el Saadawi

 
Letters from Prison
Marquis de Sade

 
War Diaries: Notebooks from
a Phony War, 1939-40

Jean-Paul Sartre

 
Course in General Linguistics
Ferdinand de Saussure

 
Sabbatai Sevi:
the mystical messiah

Gershom Gerhard Scholem

 
Hibakusha : Accounts by Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Gaynor Sekimori (Translator)

 
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Victor Serge

 Out of Print
Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
Sei Shonagon

 
The Philosophy of Money 
Georg Simmel

 
Critique of Cynical Reason
Peter Sloterdijk

 No Cover
Reflections on Violence
Georges Sorel

 No Cover
An Actor Prepares
Konstantin Stanislavski

 
The Russian Revolution, 1917
N. N. Sukhanov

 Out of Print
Zen Buddhism
D.T. Suzuki

 
Popol Vuh : The Mayan Book
of the Dawn of Life

Dennis Tedlock (Translator)

 
Tibetan Book of the Dead
Robert Thurman (translator)

 
Curious Naturalists
Niko Tinbergen

 Out of Print
The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches
Ernst Troeltsch

 
The Films in My Life
Francois Truffaut

 
The Complete Letters
Vincent Van Gogh

 
Worlds in Collision
Immanuel Velikovsky

 Out of Print
The Roman Empire
Paul Veyne 

 
The Forty Days of Musa Dagh 
Franz Werfel

 
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Max Weber

 
Oriental Despotism :
A Comparative Study
of Total Power

Karl August Wittfogel

 Out of Print
Philosophical Investigations
Ludwig Wittgenstein

 
On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: Situationist International 1957-1972
Peter Wollen

 Out of Print
A World of Yesterday
Stefan Zweig

 

CounterPunch's Favorite 100 Nonfiction Books First Published in English in 20th Century

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