The title pretty much explains the thread, name some books that were just so bad that you want them to be eliminated.
This mostly comes as a response to the Outliers: The Story of Success, a new book gaining alot of praise. The author, Malcolm Gladwell, basically argues that factors such as what time of the year you were born can determine how successful you are in some fields. I hate this book with a passion, mostly because it acts like what I call faux academia,where an author pretends to use scientific data to back up their claims, when in reality all they're using is broad statistics that they can use to make themselves appear right. Gladwell just dumbs down a ton of sociology in order to come to his conclusions, and what drives me nuts is that people are actually going along with his ideas, despite the fact that they have no real evidence behind them. Also, this might make me sound like a university elitist, but if you claim all the shit he does in the Outliers, I expect a fifty or sixty page bibliography at the end. Most editions of the Outliers don't have any pages devoted to references.
So what books do you want thrown on the burning pile?
EDIT: Because satire is hard to convey on the internet, let me make it clear that I'm not saying we should go out and start burning books we hate. This is more a discussion on terrible books then anything else, so please, no more quoting and empty moralizing on how 'burning books is anti-intellectual and wrong, blah blah blah.'
This mostly comes as a response to the Outliers: The Story of Success, a new book gaining alot of praise. The author, Malcolm Gladwell, basically argues that factors such as what time of the year you were born can determine how successful you are in some fields. I hate this book with a passion, mostly because it acts like what I call faux academia,where an author pretends to use scientific data to back up their claims, when in reality all they're using is broad statistics that they can use to make themselves appear right. Gladwell just dumbs down a ton of sociology in order to come to his conclusions, and what drives me nuts is that people are actually going along with his ideas, despite the fact that they have no real evidence behind them. Also, this might make me sound like a university elitist, but if you claim all the shit he does in the Outliers, I expect a fifty or sixty page bibliography at the end. Most editions of the Outliers don't have any pages devoted to references.
So what books do you want thrown on the burning pile?
EDIT: Because satire is hard to convey on the internet, let me make it clear that I'm not saying we should go out and start burning books we hate. This is more a discussion on terrible books then anything else, so please, no more quoting and empty moralizing on how 'burning books is anti-intellectual and wrong, blah blah blah.'
