I’ll go with the low-hanging fruit: Mein Kampf. I’ve read it, cover to cover. As a piece of propaganda, it’s good. As an example of good writing? Absolutely not (though I will admit I have only read it in translation). Oh, and the whole fascist, racist, and generally shitty worldview of the author that he infuses into the text. And the fact that the author is literally Hitler. You 5-star that book? You’re a Nazi. Period. And as a Jewish person, I don’t look too kindly on them.

  • _kwulhu_@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I’m reading a book right now (The Recognitions by William Gaddis) in which one of the characters reads Dale Carnegie’s book and the author uses this as a platform to lambast it for several pages. Here’s a sample:

    […] an action book: and herein lay the admirable quality of his work: it decreed virtue not for virtue’s sake (as weary Stoics had it); nor courtesy for courtesy (an attribute of human dignity, as civilized culture would have it); nor love for love (as Christ had it); nor a faith which is its own explanation and its own justification (as any faith has it); but all of these excellences oriented toward the marketplace. Here was no promise of anything so absurd as a void where nothing was, not so delusive as a chimerical kingdom of heaven: in short, it reconciled those virtues he had been taught as a child to the motives and practices of the man, the elixir which exchanged the things worth being for the things worth having.

    I had never even heard of this book before reading about it so it’s kind of funny to see it show up here.