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Last August the Random House imprint suffered acute embarrassment after announcing its list of the 100 best fiction books: David Streitfeld of the Washington Post discovered that many members of the board that had done the choosing had no idea how the Modern Library had ranked the novels they had chosen. To spare itself and its board members any such humiliation this time around, the Modern Library took a tack that would make Descartes proud: It hired University of Chicago statistics professor Albert Madansky to do the rankings. "We knew we had to improve the process," Random House publisher Ann Godoff conceded at the ceremony last night. In addition to hiring Madansky, the Modern Library further livened up the existing board with two younger authors (Caleb Carr and Jon Krakauer), two additional women (Carolyn See and Elaine Pagels) and a black author (Charles Johnson). The board met on two occasions to do the work of thinning the pool from 900 titles to 100. After board members ranked the books on a scale of zero to 10, Madansky ran the numbers through a computer program to come up with the ranking. Caleb Carr seemed pleased with the results: "I was shocked, especially in the top 20, at how balanced and how accurate the list was." According to Modern Library publisher David Ebershoff, there were no ties -- decimal points in Madansky's algorithms prevented them from happening. The list was restricted to books written in English. A rule that no author could have more than one book on the list eliminated Edmund Wilson's "To the Finland Station" and William James' "Pragmatism." Another rule stipulated that board members could not vote for their own books, but five members wound up being represented nonetheless: Shelby Foote, Stephen Jay Gould, Edmund Morris, Pagels and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Carolyn See felt it was high time for a West Coast woman like herself to sit on the board, which consisted mostly of East Coast scholars and historians. "On the one hand, I felt great; on the other hand, I felt like it was the 5 o'clock news and I was Sandra Hernandez Wong," See told Salon Books. "There were a lot of sports jackets in the room -- a lot of power and a lot of learnedness. I was unnerved. I hoped that I wouldn't spill my iced tea on Arthur Schlesinger." In a hall full of literati and book vendors, the first choice, "The Education of Henry Adams," drew muted applause. Conversely, the fifth choice, "Silent Spring" by Rachel Carson, received hoots and whistles. Despite the promises of a perfect science, problems persist; some critics will certainly pick holes in the computations, others in the board members' choices. "One guy on the board whose name I won't mention started playing with his dentures," See reported. Now it's up to history to determine whether the list has any teeth. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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The Modern Library's list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century: 1. "THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS," Henry Adams 2. "THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE," William James 3. "UP FROM SLAVERY," Booker T. Washington 4. "A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN," Virginia Woolf 5. "SILENT SPRING," Rachel Carson 6. "SELECTED ESSAYS, 1917-1932," T.S. Eliot 7. "THE DOUBLE HELIX," James D. Watson 8. "SPEAK, MEMORY," Vladimir Nabokov 9. "THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE," H.L. Mencken 10. "THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY," John Maynard Keynes 11. "THE LIVES OF A CELL," Lewis Thomas 12. "THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY," Frederick Jackson Turner 13. "BLACK BOY," Richard Wright 14. "ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL," E.M. Forster 15. "THE CIVIL WAR," Shelby Foote 16. "THE GUNS OF AUGUST," Barbara W. Tuchman 17. "THE PROPER STUDY OF MANKIND," Isaiah Berlin 18. "THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN," Reinhold Niebuhr 19. "NOTES OF A NATIVE SON," James Baldwin 20. "THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS," Gertrude Stein 21. "THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE," William Strunk and E.B. White 22. "AN AMERICAN DILEMMA," Gunnar Myrdal 23. "PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA," Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell 24. "THE MISMEASURE OF MAN," Stephen Jay Gould 25. "THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP," Meyer Howard Abrams 26. "THE ART OF THE SOLUBLE," Peter B. Medawar 27. "THE ANTS," Bert Hoelldobler and Edward O. Wilson 28. "A THEORY OF JUSTICE," John Rawls 29. "ART AND ILLUSION," Ernest H. Gombrich 30. "THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS," E.P. Thompson 31. "THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK," W.E.B. Du Bois 32. "PRINCIPIA ETHICA," G.E. Moore 33. "PHILOSOPHY AND CIVILIZATION," John Dewey 34. "ON GROWTH AND FORM," D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson 35. "IDEAS AND OPINIONS," Albert Einstein 36. "THE AGE OF JACKSON," Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. 37. "THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB," Richard Rhodes 38. "BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON," Rebecca West 39. "AUTOBIOGRAPHIES," W.B. Yeats 40. "SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION IN CHINA," Joseph Needham 41. "GOODBYE TO ALL THAT," Robert Graves 42. "HOMAGE TO CATALONIA," George Orwell 43. "THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN," Mark Twain 44. "CHILDREN OF CRISIS," Robert Coles 45. "A STUDY OF HISTORY," Arnold J. Toynbee 46. "THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY," John Kenneth Galbraith 47. "PRESENT AT THE CREATION," Dean Acheson 48. "THE GREAT BRIDGE," David McCullough 49. "PATRIOTIC GORE," Edmund Wilson 50. "SAMUEL JOHNSON," Walter Jackson Bate 51. "THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM X," Alex Haley and Malcolm X 52. "THE RIGHT STUFF," Tom Wolfe 53. "EMINENT VICTORIANS," Lytton Strachey 54. "WORKING," Studs Terkel 55. "DARKNESS VISIBLE," William Styron 56. "THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION," Lionel Trilling 57. "THE SECOND WORLD WAR," Winston Churchill 58. "OUT OF AFRICA," Isak Dinesen 59. "JEFFERSON AND HIS TIMES," Dumas Malone 60. "IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN," William Carlos Williams 61. "CADILLAC DESERT," Marc Reisner 62. "THE HOUSE OF MORGAN," Ron Chernow 63. "THE SWEET SCIENCE," A. J. Liebling 64. "THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES," Karl Popper 65. "THE ART OF MEMORY," Frances A. Yates 66. "RELIGION AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM," R. H. Tawney 67. "A PREFACE TO MORALS," Walter Lippmann 68. "THE GATE OF HEAVENLY PEACE," Jonathan D. Spence 69. "THE STRUCTURE OF SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTIONS," Thomas S. Kuhn 70. "THE STRANGE CAREER OF JIM CROW," C. Vann Woodward 71. "THE RISE OF THE WEST," William H. McNeill 72. "THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS," Elaine Pagels 73. "JAMES JOYCE," Richard Ellmann 74. "FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE," Cecil Woodham-Smith 75. "THE GREAT WAR AND MODERN MEMORY," Paul Fussell 76. "THE CITY IN HISTORY," Lewis Mumford 77. "BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM," James M. McPherson 78. "WHY WE CAN'T WAIT," Martin Luther King Jr. 79. "THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT," Edmund Morris 80. "STUDIES IN ICONOLOGY," Erwin Panofsky 81. "THE FACE OF BATTLE," John Keegan 82. "THE STRANGE DEATH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND," George Dangerfield 83. "VERMEER," Lawrence Gowing 84. "A BRIGHT SHINING LIE," Neil Sheehan 85. "WEST WITH THE NIGHT," Beryl Markham 86. "THIS BOY'S LIFE," Tobias Wolff 87. "A MATHEMATICIAN'S APOLOGY," G.H. Hardy 88. "SIX EASY PIECES," Richard P. Feynman 89. "PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK," Annie Dillard 90. "THE GOLDEN BOUGH," James George Frazer 91. "SHADOW AND ACT," Ralph Ellison 92. "THE POWER BROKER," Robert A. Caro 93. "THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITION," Richard Hofstadter 94. "THE CONTOURS OF AMERICAN HISTORY," William Appleman Williams 95. "THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE," Herbert Croly 96. "IN COLD BLOOD," Truman Capote 97. "THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER," Janet Malcolm 98. "THE TAMING OF CHANCE," Ian Hacking 99. "OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS," Anne Lamott 100. "MELBOURNE," Lord David Cecil
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