| modern library | 100 best nonfiction |
| The Board
of the Modern Library has announced its selection of the 100 Best
Nonfiction books of the century - published first in English.. |
| LOS
ANGELES, April 29, 1999 - The Modern Library has selected its list of
the 100 best nonfiction books written in English and published in the
20th Century. The voting members of the Modern Library editorial board are: A. S. Byatt, Caleb Carr, Christopher Cerf, Shelby Foote, Stephen Jay Gould, Vartan Gregorian, Charles Johnson, Jon Krakauer, Edmund Morris, Elaine Pagels, John Richardson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Carolyn See. The Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books were chosen for their literary and intellectual merit. Board members could vote only for books that they themselves had read and could not vote for their own books, although books by board members are included on the final list. Books were selected regardless of publisher and it was agreed that any author would be represented by only one title. Finally, each board member was allowed to add to the list one book that he or she felt passionately should be included. "The intelligence and breadth of this list fully captures the adventure of reading widely and well," said Ann Godoff, president, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Random House. "To anyone who loves books, to see Rachel Carson beside T. S. Eliot, or E. M. Forster flanked by Richard Wright's Black Boy and Shelby Foote's The Civil War, is simply exhilarating. Our Modern Library editorial board has outdone itself." The list was carefully compiled during an eight-month process. Voting was conducted from a master ballot of over 900 titles that had been assembled by Modern Library and Random House staff and then added to by the board members. The board met twice in New York, first to determine the selection criteria and then to assess the list's progress. Every book was rated by each board member on a numeric scale, with two rounds of voting. To assemble the final list of 100 titles, Professor Albert Madansky of the University of Chicago undertook the delicate task of ranking the votes of all of the voting board members. His statistical analysis explicitly took into account several variables, and applied a rigorous and systematic methodology to the ranking. When an author had more than one book in the list, the editorial board decision to include only one book by each author was implemented by including only the author's highest ranked book. Of the 100 books on the best nonfiction list, seven are currently out of print and six were written by authors who had works on last year's Modern Library 100 Best Novels list: Virginia Woolf, William Styron, Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Richard Wright, and E. M. Forster. The Modern Library will publish four titles selected from the final list as special edition Modern Library paperbacks: The Education of Henry Adams, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Up From Slavery, and Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. |
Diese Liste bei  Randomhouse |
|
1. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams |