Bücher der Reihe Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all timeIn Up from Slavery, Washington recounts the story of his life—from slave to educator. The early sections deal with his upbringing as a slave and his efforts to get an education. Washington details his transition from student to teacher, and outlines his own development as an educator and founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In the final chapters of Up From Slavery, Washington describes his career as a public speaker and civil rights activist.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time ''I cannot remember when I was not fascinated by Henry Adams,'' said Gore Vidal. ''He was remarkably prescient about the coming horrors.'' His political ideals shaped by two presidential ancestors—great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams—Henry Adams was one of the most powerful and original minds to confront the American scene from the Civil War to the First World War. Printed privately in 1907 and published to wide acclaim shortly after the author&''s death in 1918, The Education of Henry Adams is a brilliant, idiosyncratic blend of autobiography and history that charts the great transformation in American life during the so-called Gilded Age. With an introduction by renowned historian Edmund Morris.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all timeThe Varieties of Religious Experience was an immediate bestseller upon its publication in June 1902. Reflecting the pluralistic views of psychologist turned philosopher William James, it posits that individual religious experiences, rather than the tenets of organized religions, form the backbone of religious life. James's discussion of conversion, repentance, mysticism, and hope of reward and fears of punishment in the hereafter-as well as his observations on the religious experiences of such diverse thinkers as Voltaire, Emerson, Luther, and others-all support his thesis. Walter Houston Clark in Psychology Today deemed it "the most notable of all books in the field of the psychology of religion."