Worst Non-Fiction Books You've Read?

Residents FanResidents Fan Posts: 9,204
Forum Member
The worst books on science history, art, politics, etc.
you've had the misfortune to read?


Hollywood versus America, by Michael Medved.
Granted, I didn't agree with Medved's politics, but
I thought it was badly written and full of
internal contradictions- one section argued that violent
Hollywood movies were causing violence in the
US- then a few pages later Medved stated
real-world violence in the US was declining! :confused:

Comments

  • InsideSoapInsideSoap Posts: 5,981
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    Jeremy Kyle - I'm Only Being Honest. I cannot stand this odious vile man but I read this out the library a few years ago. From up on his high horse he spouts out rubbish about how to improve Britain whilst telling us bits and pieces about his own life. One of the worst books I have ever read.
  • stud u likestud u like Posts: 42,100
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    A rather smelly book about Crowley. It stank the house out and went in the bin.
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 735
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    I can only think of autobiographies but I've read a good few dodgy ones.

    Once, during a fit of madness, I bought Katie Price's first autobiography. I don't know why because I don't even like her and never have. I think it was on sale. Unsurprisingly it was absolutely awful.

    I've also read a few memoirs which turned out to be drivel.
  • Residents FanResidents Fan Posts: 9,204
    Forum Member
    A rather smelly book about Crowley. It stank the house out and went in the bin.


    Is that Crowley as in "Controversial Occultist
    Aleister Crowley?" :rolleyes:

    I remember being disappointed by "The Modern
    Weird Tale" by S.T. Joshi. While the sections
    on Ramsey Campbell and Shirley Jackson were superb, a lot of the book was fully of crude sniping and poor arguments. For instance, while I would normally
    agree with Joshi that William Peter Blatty is a poor writer, Joshi spent several pages attacking not Blatty's fiction, but rather Blatty's religious beliefs. This is the sort of poor criticism one normally learns to avoid in college ( readers bought Joshi's book for its assessment of horror writers' literary merit, not for a discussion of its religious viewpoint).

    Also, Joshi spent a huge amount of venom on Stephen King. While I don't think all King's work is perfect and should be above criticism, you really got the sense that Joshi has an extraordinarily intense dislike of King's work:
    King’s writing, considered abstractly, is a mixture of cheap sentiment, naïve moral polarizations between valiant heroes and wooden villains, hackneyed, implausible, and ill-explained supernatural phenomena, a plain, bland, easy-to-read style with just the right number of scatological and sexual profanities to titillate his middle-class audience, and a subscribing to the conventional morality of common people.

    :eek:
  • Loz_FraggleLoz_Fraggle Posts: 5,757
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    Danny Dyer's autobiography, it made my eyes bleed.
  • goldberry1goldberry1 Posts: 2,699
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    I recently had a book out of the library (some of us actually still do this) which seemed quite interesting by the cover and the index. It was a man who hiked all over the place in this country and abroad. It turns out he was an academic on some sort of spiritual quest or pilgrimage, and I couldn't make head nor tail about what he was going on about. Even the few black and white pictures were odd - close up views of a couple of boulders and nothing to say where it was. It was so uninteresting I can't even remember the name or the author. Just goes to show that you can't always 'judge a book by its cover.' :rolleyes:
  • phylo_roadkingphylo_roadking Posts: 21,339
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    "Grey Wolf" by Gerard Williams and Simon Dunstan.

    This gives excrement a bad name.
  • ViridianaViridiana Posts: 8,017
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    I bought at a charity shop a a book called "Strange Days" by one of jim Morrison's girlfriends.
    I should have known better to buy a book of someone that called herself Patricia Keneally-Morrison, but nothing prepared me for what I've read, what a nutter. A total fantasist.
    It should have been under fiction.
  • JohnbeeJohnbee Posts: 4,019
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    It is a great pity that one can not get a good book about Russia or China in Britain. One I read a couple of years ago about Chairman Mao was simply a total rubbishing job, and one about Kruschev who is an interesting man, by Willam Taubman, seemed to be written as a primer for schoolchildren whose title ought to b 'Why all Rusians are evil and bad'. It does not even mention Krushchev hammering his shoe at the UN after the Gary Powers incident. I suppose the publisher was scared that we might like K. for that.
    Actually the most unreadable non fiction book ever written is The Seven Pillars Of Wisdom. Don't try it, you'll die.
  • Residents FanResidents Fan Posts: 9,204
    Forum Member
    Johnbee wrote: »
    It is a great pity that one can not get a good book about Russia or China in Britain. One I read a couple of years ago about Chairman Mao was simply a total rubbishing job, and one about Kruschev who is an interesting man, by Willam Taubman, seemed to be written as a primer for schoolchildren whose title ought to b 'Why all Rusians are evil and bad'. It does not even mention Krushchev hammering his shoe at the UN after the Gary Powers incident. I suppose the publisher was scared that we might like K. for that.

    Didn't the Taubman book get lotsa good reviews and
    win a Pulitzer Prize? Seems like people thought
    it was a good history book.

    Back to S.T. Joshi... I've really gone off his work after
    I came across this appalling 1993 interview with him
    on the old alt.horror.cthulhu group. Joshi describes
    Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard as
    " two-bit hack writers who never amounted
    to anything and never will" and then says this:
    (Robert M.) Price: Howard held the gun to his own head.

    [Audience laughs.]

    Joshi: Yeah, yeah. I only wish Howard had held the gun to his head a little _earlier_.

    :eek: :eek: :eek:

    https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!searchin/alt.horror.cthulhu/joshi$20$2B$20%22colin$20wilson%22/alt.horror.cthulhu/JpaXBOcXg9I/8vGrLfdGU-0J
  • Mrs MackintoshMrs Mackintosh Posts: 1,870
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    I was flicking through Justin Lee Collins autobiography in Waterstones one day (this was before he was disgraced as a controlling monster). It was such rubbish. There was a whole chapter about him buying a Chicago Town Pizza. What a waste of a tree.
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