Bookplanet: most harmful books

An editorial in Eye Weekly comments on a list of harmful books picked by 15 conservative academics, and comes up with another list of harmful books, which includes the Bible.

"Only one of the books on their harmful list -- Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf -- has a direct body count attached to it, but even with millions left dead in its wake, the academics who devised the list still deemed it only the second most harmful book of the past 200 years. It was beaten out by Marx and Engels' The Communist Manifesto, which suggests that, given the choice, conservatives would prefer to face the gas chamber than pay workers a fair wage.

The rest of the list can be evenly divided into pinko handbooks (Quotations from Chairman Mao; Das Kapital; General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money), feminist/sex ed. texts (The Kinsey Report, The Feminine Mystique) and books that suggest God may just be an imaginary dude with a big beard (Democracy and Education, The Course of Positive Philosophy, Beyond Good and Evil). The net result of all this harm: labour unions, welfare states, female doctors and lawyers, increased acceptance of homosexuality and a history guided more by modern science than thousand-year-old religious doctrine.

Naturally, we think these are all good things, because our definition of harm is more objective: we would never drive cars off cliffs, take bubble baths with electric appliances, or call Shaquille O'Neal a "punk-ass bitch," because we know these things would certainly result in our deaths. As such, our list of Most Harmful Books would include titles that actually inspired or resulted in grievous harm of some kind. We hereby present a list of texts that are indisputably dangerous -- not necessarily in their ideas, but in the ways they've been used and abused.

The Bible, God (as told to various authors): Yes, for thousands of years, the Bible has inspired billions of readers to forge a personal relationship with God as a gateway to eternal happiness. But from bombed abortion clinics to nearly every holy war in history to drunken yahoos cheering on quarterback sacks while holding "John 3:16" signs in the bleachers, the Good Book has resulted in all kinds of bad blood, both in the literal and figurative senses.

The Quran, God (as told to Muhammad): Pretty much the same ill effects as The Bible, except the yahoos aren't drunk and they have long beards.

Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger: Thanks to one overzealous reader, Mark David Chapman, Salinger's portrait of disillusioned youth forever ensured the impossibility of a Beatles reunion.

The Pet Goat, Siegfried Engelmann and Elaine Bruner: This heartwarming story of a boy and his goat is so insidiously mesmerizing that it kept George W. Bush transfixed for a full seven minutes after learning that the first plane had hit the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand: Beyond asserting the controversial belief in placing individual interest over societal obligation, this book has inspired more than a few excruciating Rush lyrics.

Sex and Psychic Energy, Betty Bethards: According to legend, this book was Elvis Presley's last-ever piece of toilet-reading on the fateful night of Aug. 17, 1977.

The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie: Perhaps the only book to score a Whitbread Award and a fatwa. While the author eluded the Ayatollah Khomeini-commissioned death sentence, the book's Japanese translator (Hitoshi Igarashi) was not so lucky -- he was stabbed to death in 1991.

What Is Scientology? L. Ron Hubbard: In addition to allegedly inspiring the sad spectacle of Tom Cruise protesting his masculinity on Oprah, the world's largest religion founded by a best-selling pulp sci-fi writer convinced John Travolta that Battlefield Earth would make a great movie.

Many of the books on our list, of course, are quite good (J.D. and Salman, come on down) and most, in the right hands, are benign. There's a moral here, one many American conservatives should easily recognize: books don't harm people; people harm people. And people who think books are harmful tend to be the most harmful people of all.