A Theory of Justice
1971 · 538 pages
Rawls asks which rules you would pick for a society without knowing your place in it. His answer, equal liberties and inequality only when it lifts the worst off, reset political philosophy.
★ 8.3
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1971
Showing 10 books from 1971
The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr
1971 · 264 pages
Niebuhr's argument: an individual can rise above self-interest and a nation cannot, so justice comes from power balanced against power. Cold War strategists and Martin Luther King alike thought in his terms.
★ 6.6
The Classical Style
1971 · 533 pages
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven made drama out of harmony itself, Rosen shows, with tension and resolution shaping every movement. A concert pianist wrote it, and it changed how musicians hear the whole period.
★ 6.5
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
1971 · 204 pages
Raoul Duke and his attorney drive to Las Vegas with a trunk of narcotics to cover a desert motorcycle race and a drug enforcement conference. The bender becomes Thompson's autopsy of the sixties.
★ 6.4
Malina
1971 · 283 pages
In a Vienna apartment a woman without a name loves Ivan and lives with Malina, and her interior life comes apart. Bachmann writes private ruin and Austria's buried fascism as the same catastrophe.
★ 6.1
Angle of Repose
1971 · 672 pages
From his wheelchair a historian rebuilds his grandmother's life from her letters: a New York illustrator who followed a mining engineer west. Stegner's Pulitzer novel holds a region in one marriage.
★ 6.0
Rules for Radicals
1971 · 196 pages
Alinsky wrote the manual for taking power when you have none: pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Decades later Tea Party trainers were handing it to conservative organizers.
★ 6.0
Open Veins of Latin America
1971 · 317 pages
Galeano's charge is that Latin America is poor because it was rich: five centuries of silver, sugar, rubber and oil carried off to Europe and the United States. Four dictatorships banned the book.
★ 5.7
The Lorax
1971 · 70 pages
Seuss's Once-ler chops down the Truffula trees to knit Thneeds nobody needs, and a mustachioed creature rises to speak for the trees. Loggers hated it enough to commission a rebuttal picture book.
★ 4.7
The World Atlas of Wine
1971 · 416 pages
Wine as geography: Johnson and Robinson map every serious vineyard region on earth, down to the slope and soil, so you can see why one hillside tastes different from the next field over.
★ 4.5