Whether you’re an academic or plain layperson looking for new frontiers of learning, you’d find “The New Canon” special in
The Chronicle of Higher Education stimulating and eye-opening. It presents the individual choices of 21 scholars as the most influential academic book published in the past 20 years. Among the choices: Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” Jo Guldi and David Armitage’s “The History Manifesto,” and Jon Levy’s “Freaks of Fortune: the Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in Modern America.”
The Chronicle explains how the selection of the books was made: “We invited scholars from across the academy to tell us what they saw as the most influential book published in the past 20 years. (Some respondents named books slightly outside our time frame, but we included them anyway.) We asked them to select books — academic or not, but written by scholars — from within or outside their own fields. It was up to our respondents to define “influential,” but we asked them to explain why they chose the books they did. Here are their answers.”
Read “New Canon: What’s the most influential book of the past 20 years?” in the Forum now!RELATED READINGS:Check out these two related 2014 readings in the Forum:
“12 scholars on the nonfiction books that profoundly changed their minds” “10 game-changing books on higher-education teaching and learning”
