List of controversial non-fiction books

This is a list of controversial non-fiction books aimed at the general reader which discuss controversial issues, or are (or were at the time of writing) controversial for other reasons. For controversial fictional books, see list of banned books.


 * This list is alphabetical by topic, and books should be ordered by publication date within topics

''Criteria for inclusion:
 * This list is intended to be selective, not exhaustive.
 * The standard for books written in the last 40 years is necessarily weaker than that for older books, as there is no way of knowing whether these books will be as highly regarded (or reviled) in the decades to come. Their topical nature makes them important, and so they should be included here.
 * verifiable references for the existence and size of the controversy must be provided

Agriculture

 * 1940: An Agricultural Testament by Sir Albert Howard

Anthropology

 * 1928: Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
 * 1997: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
 * 2000: Darkness in El Dorado by Patrick Tierney

Artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness

 * 1976: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
 * 1986: The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky
 * 1990: The Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose
 * 1991: Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett
 * 2000: The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil

Astronomy

 * 1543: De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium by Nicolaus Copernicus
 * 1632: Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei
 * 1950: Worlds in Collision by Immanuel Velikovsky

Business and bureaucracy

 * 1969: The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peter

Cosmology

 * 1986: The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler
 * 1987: Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies by Halton Arp
 * 1998: Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology, and Academic Science by Halton Arp
 * 2002: A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram

Drug culture

 * 1967: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
 * 1991: PiHKAL by Alexander Shulgin

Economics

 * 1776 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (or The Wealth of Nations) by Adam Smith, a Scottish economist, discusses political economy, merchantilism, free trade, division of labor, the Industrial Revolution, the work of the Invisible hand in the free market, and defends capitalism. Some consider it to be the first modern work in the field of economics.


 * 1817 On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation by David Ricardo, discusses the controversial economic topics of land value, economic rent, comparative advantage, free trade, and the economic principle of absolute advantage.


 * 1867 Das Kapital by Karl Marx expounds upon the subject of political economy and is very critical of capitalism.


 * 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes, an English economist, is credited with creating the field of macro-economics and emphasized government-oriented management of the aggregate level of demand in the economy.


 * 1980 Free to Choose by economists Milton and Rose D. Friedman advocates that the economic forces of supply and demand (a.k.a. "the free market") are better at solving problems than government-oriented approaches. Friedman is a Nobel Prize winner in the field of Economics and is a retired professor from the University of Chicago.

Education

 * 1996: The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.
 * Hirsch proposed that Romanticized, anti-knowledge theories of education prevalent in America are not only the cause of America's lackluster educational performance, but were also a cause of widening inequalities in class and race. Hirsch portrays the focus of American educational theory as one which attempts to give students intellectual tools such as "critical thinking skills", but which denigrate teaching any actual content, labeling it "mere rote learning".  Hirsch states that it is this attitude which has failed to develop knowledgeable students.  The book was answered by those supporting the status quo, including The Schools Our Children Deserve by Alfie Kohn and The Schools We Deserve by Diane Ravitch.

Environmentalism

 * 1798: An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus
 * Malthus promoted a view of the lower classes as being an economic burden rather than a resource, and predicted that their population growth could lead to catastrophic food shortages. This adversely affected British social legislation at the time, but also prompted the first census, inspired movements promoting contraception, and contributed to both Darwin and Wallace's formulation of a theory of natural selection.


 * 1962: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
 * This book popularized environmentalism by exposing to the public the dangers of chemical pesticides, and accusing the chemical industry of unethical behavior. This led to a subsequent ban of the pesticide DDT, however some claim that this ban is responsible for a worldwide resurgence in malaria and millions of human deaths.


 * 1968: The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich
 * 1972: The Limits to Growth; A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind
 * 1981: The Ultimate Resource by Julian Lincoln Simon
 * 2000: The Peak Of World Oil Production And The Road To The Olduvai Gorge by Richard C. Duncan
 * 2001: The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjørn Lomborg

Evolution
Darwin put forth a theory of natural selection, which contradicted the doctrine of "created kinds" which was derived from a literal reading of the Book of Genesis. Morgan's Aquatic ape hypothesis challenges the theory that early humans evolved on the savannah, and argues that several human characteristics which are uncommon to mammals can be better explained by a semi-aquatic environment. The book is popular among feminists because it emphasizes the role of reproductive traits in human evolution.
 * 1859: The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
 * 1972: The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan
 * 1976: The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
 * 1995: Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett
 * 1996: Darwin's Black Box by Michael J. Behe
 * 2000: Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells

Feminist theory

 * 1970: The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Futurology

 * 1970: Future Shock by Alvin Toffler
 * 1982: Megatrends by John Naisbitt
 * 2003: Our Final Hour (UK title: Our Final Century) by Martin Rees

Globalization

 * 1968: War and Peace in the Global Village by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore
 * 2000: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies by Naomi Klein
 * 2002: World on Fire:How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability by Amy Chua

History

 * 1973: The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
 * 1976: The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur R. Butz
 * 1985: From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters
 * 1987: Black Athena (volume I) by Martin Bernal
 * 1991: Hindu Temples - What Happened to Them by Sita Ram Goel
 * 1992: The End of History by Francis Fukuyama
 * 1993: ''Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust by Kevin Annett
 * 1996: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington
 * 1996: Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen
 * 1997: The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang
 * 2002: Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple by Koenraad Elst
 * 2002: 1421, The Year China Discovered the World by Gavin Menzies
 * 2005: Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
 * 2005: The Crime of Napoleon by Claude Ribbe

Media

 * 1954: Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham
 * 1957: The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
 * 1964: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man by Marshall McLuhan
 * 1967: The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore
 * 1977: Mass-Mediated Culture by Michael R. Real
 * 1985: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
 * 1988: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman
 * 1998: Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud by Arun Shourie
 * 2002: Hollywood and Big Tobacco

Philosophy of science
Popper refuted the classical observationalist-inductivist account of science, and put forth falsifiability as a criterion of demarcation for proper scientific theories. Kuhn reformulated the conception of scientific progress, resisting the formalization of a "scientific method", arguing instead that scientific theories are accepted and rejected based on their explanatory power within their historical context. He coined the term "paradigm shift" to describe this process. Postmodernists interpret the book as undermining the scientific establishment, but Kuhn himself was a firm believer in scientific progress. Feyerabend advocated theoretical anarchism, arguing that many instances of scientific progress have violated established criterion for "good science". Falsificationism and consistency he claims, as well as any methodology, will limit science, and thus "anything goes" is the best ideology.
 * 1959: The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Logik der Forschung) by Karl Popper
 * 1962: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
 * 1975: Against Method by Paul Feyerabend

Political theory

 * 1512: The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
 * 1651: Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
 * 1791: The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
 * 1848: The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
 * 1896: Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard
 * 1925/1926: Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
 * 1944: The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek
 * 1951: The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
 * 1960: On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn
 * 1967: The Report from Iron Mountain by Leonard C. Lewin
 * 1968: Coup D'État by Edward Luttwak
 * 1970: The Islamic Declaration by Alija Izetbegovic


 * 1986: The Calcutta Quran Petition by Sita Ram Goel
 * 2001: Democracy: The God That Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

Contemporary politics

 * 2001: Stupid White Men by Michael Moore
 * 2003: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken.

Psychiatry

 * 1961: The Myth of Mental Illness by Thomas Szasz

Race and intelligence

 * 1981/1996: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould
 * 1994: The Bell Curve by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray
 * 2002: IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen

Religion

 * 1793: Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason by Immanuel Kant
 * 1795: The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
 * 1970: The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey
 * 1982: The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln
 * 1988: Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism by John Shelby Spong
 * 1997: The Bible Code by Michael Drosnin
 * 1999: Hitler's Pope by John Cornwell

Sociology

 * 1948: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey
 * 1953: Sexual Behavior in the Human Female by Alfred Kinsey
 * 1956: The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills
 * 1975: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis by E. O. Wilson
 * 2002: Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex by Judith Levine