CONSERVATIVES NOMINATE
 WORST BOOKS OF THE
 CENTURY
 SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS
 SERVICE

 Date: Friday, December 3, 1999

 Section: Source: By LINDA SEEBACH

 Scripps Howard News Service

 Memo: Column

 For SUNDAY release
 (Linda Seebach writes editorials for the Denver Rocky
 Mountain News.)

 Edition: 

 If you've had your fill of best-of-the-century lists, let me
 recommend a mordant antidote to all that gush. The
 Intercollegiate Studies Institute has compiled a list of the
 century's (ital)worst(endital): 50 nonfiction books,
 originally published in English, "which were widely
 celebrated in their day but which upon reflection can be
 seen as foolish, wrong-headed, or even pernicious."

 Tops on their list: "Coming of Age in Samoa," by
 Margaret Mead (1928).

 "So amusing did the natives find the white woman's
 prurient questions that they told her the wildest tales and
 she believed them! Mead misled a generation into
 believing that the fantasies of sexual progressives were an
 historical reality on an island far, far away."

 I had to read Mead in college, but otherwise I have been
 quite successful in avoiding almost all the books on the
 list, mostly because they are widely quoted and I know
 enough about them to know I am unlikely to profit from
 reading the whole thing.

 ISI has a "50 best" list too, of weighty and excellent
 tomes that I mostly haven't read but think I ought to.
 Winston Churchill, "The Second World War," for
 instance. On the other hand, I can say without guilt that I
 have no intention of ever reading Ludwig Wittgenstein's
 "Philosophical Investigations."

 The "worst" list is more fun.

 Rounding out the top five: "Soviet Communism: A New
 Civilization?" by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, 1935. "An
 idea whose time has come .... and gone, thank God."

 "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" by Alfred Kinsey
 et al., 1948.

 "So mesmerized were Americans by the authority of
 Science, with a capital S, that it took 40 years for anyone
 to wonder how data are gathered on the sexual responses
 of children as young as 5."

 "One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, 1964.
 "Dumbed-down Heidegger and a seeming praise of
 kinkiness became the Bible of the '60s and early
 postmodernism."

 "Democracy and Education" by John Dewey (1916).
 "Dewey convinced a generation of intellectuals that
 education isn't about anything; it's just a method."

 Among that disreputable crew, I think I would have to
 nominate Dewey as the most damaging, but the
 competition is tough.

 ISI is a conservative think tank dedicated to higher
 education. It publishes a journal, "The Intercollegiate
 Review," and a student-edited paper, "Campus."

 The book lists appeared in the Fall 1999 issue of the
 "Review," and you can also enjoy them on the Web site,
 isi.org.

 It also publishes books, including "The Devil Knows
 Latin," by E. Christian Kopff, a professor of classics at
 the University of Colorado, Boulder. Kopff was one of
 the dozen consultants recruited to select (and comment
 on) the "worst" list.

 Another ISI book I received recently is "Plagues of the
 Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge," by
 Bruce Thornton, which I look forward to reading. Al
 Gore's "Earth in the Balance" is unaccountably missing
 from the "worst" list, but Thornton gives it its due: "a
 melange of New-Age therapy, nature-love, and recycled
 myths expressing dissatisfaction with civilization and
 technology."

 Surely Gore deserves a place in this company more than
 John F. Kennedy, "Profiles in Courage," 1965. "Should
 have been called Profiles in Ghost-Writing," the
 commentator says, but whoever wrote it it's a pretty
 good book.

 One book appears on both lists, "The Autobiography of
 Malcolm X," by Malcolm X with the assistance of Alex
 Haley. " 'By any means necessary'? No, violence was
 not, and is not, the answer," says one reader, and "The
 spiritual journey of a sensitive and intelligent man" says
 the other.

 The "worst" list is a chronicle of 20th-century follies.
 John Kenneth Galbraith and John Maynard Keynes in
 economics; Lillian Hellman, Alger Hiss and John Reed as
 deluded adherents of the Soviet Union; Carl Rogers and
 B. F.Skinner, for distinct but equally egregious
 misreadings of human psychology; Noam Chomsky, who
 could have won for any number of reasons but is
 nominated here for his justification of the Khmer Rouge
 terror in Cambodia.

 "What has our century produced that deserves
 admiration?" the ISI editors ask. "What has it produced
 that deserves only contempt?" This is their thoughtful
 attempt at an answer.