Re:What’s the Most Influential Book of the Past 20 Years?
by CPLX on Saturday November 03, 2018 @08:33AM
(#18369893)
The title has a question mark at the end.
The article then contains the various answers of a variety of people they posed that question to.
The publication is called the chronicle of higher education and the people they asked for their thoughts on the answer all work in higher education.
That seems like exactly the kind of thing I’d expect to see when clicking on that headline.
Re:What’s the Most Influential Book of the Past 20 Years?
by improbable22 on Saturday November 03, 2018 @07:13AM
(#18369671)
Also, nobody answered the question -- they answered instead "what book by an academic (near my field) deserves more influence".
Which if this is a gift shopping list is a more useful question. But largely separate from what books have been influential already.
Re:What’s the Most Influential Book of the Past 20 Years?
by Emma_Goldman on Saturday November 03, 2018 @09:59AM
(#18370173)
Intellectual life only became professionalised in the 20th century. So no, that's not the implication.
Marx was funded by Engels, whose father owned a factory in Manchester. Darwin was funded by his parents.
Thankfully, scholars no longer need to depend upon the wealth of their parents and connections.
And to quote the article itself "Ideally, then, the candidates would be like On the Origin of Species or Das Kapital or The Interpretation of Dreams. But those books were written more than 100 years ago, and none by an academic.". So there is a case to be made that academics written books are not that influential.