Updated Saturday, March 20, 1999, at 3:30 AM
Listomania
Slate's readers name the era's silliest books.
New York University's journalism department recently bade adieu to the millennium by picking the 20th century's 100 greatest pieces of journalism. NYU's ranking of Jonathan Schell's 1982 book The Fate of the Earth--an overheated and self-edifying prophesy of nuclear disaster--at No. 59, inspired Michael Kinsley to recruitSlate readers in naming the century's 100 Silliest Books Taken Seriously (By Serious People).
Although we received a wide variety of entries, consensus emerged around these eight books and authors, in this order:
1. The Greening of America, by Charles Reich
2. Earth in the Balance, by Al Gore
3. The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray
4. Das Kapital, by Karl Marx
5. The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich
6. The End of History, by Francis Fukuyama
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Jodi Kantor is Slate's New York editor.
Timothy Noah is a former Slate staffer. His book about income inequality is The Great Divergence.