Los 100 mejores libros de no-ficción de la historia según The Guardian

Un verdadero carnaval de obras clásicas de la literatura no ficticia es lo que nos ofrece un reciente listado publicado por el diario inglés The Guardian, en el que el equipo editorial se dio a la tare de elegir a las 100 obras más grandes de dicha categoría. A lo largo de la lista vemos desfilar desde algunos de los más reconocidos filósofos (Platón, Hegel, Nietzsche, Hume, Descartes) hasta el periodismo psicodélico de Tom Wolfe o James Lovelock, el padre de la teoría de Gaia, pasando por nombres tan distintos entre sí como Susan Sontag, Oscar Wilde, Rousseau, Ghandi, Nabokov, Engels, McLuhan y Chomsky. Aunque, como cualquier lista de esta especie, no dejan de haber algunas exclusiones que se lamentan; extrañamos, por ejemplo, alguna obra de Jung, Talbot, Octavio Paz o, por qué no, Schopenhauer.

La mayoría de las obras aquí incluidas no es lectura propiamente de hamaca y descanso, pero sin duda podrían ser una generosa compañía durante esta temporada veraniega en la que seguramente podrás dedicar un poco más de tiempo, en comparación con el resto del año, a una de las actividades más enriquecedoras a las que tenemos acceso los seres humanos: la buena lectura.

Arte

The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes (1980)
The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich (1950)
Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972)

Biografía

Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari (1550)
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791)
The Diaries of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys (1825)
Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918)
Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933)

Cultura

Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag (1964)
Mythologies by Roland Barthes (1972)
Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)

Medioambiente

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)

Historia

The Histories by Herodotus (c400 BC)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776)
The History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1848)
Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (1963)
The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970)
Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel (1970)
Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński (1982)
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm (1994)
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Familes by Philip Gourevitch (1999)
Postwar by Tony Judt (2005)

Periodismo

The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)

Literatura

The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson (1781)
An Image of Africa by Chinua Achebe (1975)
The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)

Matemática

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979)

Memorias

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845)
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence (1922)
The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi (1927)
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951)
The Man Died by Wole Soyinka (1971)
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975)
Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (2000)

Mente

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1899)

Musica

The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen (1998)

Filosofía

The Symposium by Plato (c380 BC)
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (c180)
Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621)
Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (1641)
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (1779)Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781)

Phenomenology of Mind by GWF Hegel (1807)
Walden by HD Thoreau (1854)
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)
Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962)

Política

The Art of War by Sun Tzu (c500 BC)
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois (1903)
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon (1961)
The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967)
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988)
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (2008)

Religión

The Golden Bough by James George Frazer (1890)
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)

Ciencia

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)
The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynmann (1965)
The Double Helix by James Watson (1968)
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)

Sociedad

The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan (1405)
Praise of Folly by Erasmus (1511)
Letters Concerning the English Nation by Voltaire (1734)
Suicide by Émile Durkheim (1897)
Economy and Society by Max Weber (1922)
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)
Capote (1966)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968)
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (1975)
News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez (1996)

Viajes

The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta (1355)
Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869)
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (1941)
Venice by Jan Morris (1960)
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977)
Danube by Claudio Magris (1986)
China Along the Yellow River by Cao Jinqing (1995)
The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald (1995)
Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban (2000)
Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (2002)