The Greatest Books of All Time

Top Ten Works of the 20th Century

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

2.The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

3. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

4. Ulysses* by James Joyce

5. Dubliners* by James Joyce

6. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

7. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

8. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

9. The complete stories of Flannery O'Connor

10. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

Top Ten Works of the 19th Century

1. Anna Karenina* by Leo Tolstoy

2. Madame Bovary* by Gustave Flaubert

3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

5. The stories of Anton Chekhov

6. Middlemarch* by George Eliot

7. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

8. Great Expectations* by Charles Dickens

9. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

10. Emma* by Jane Austen

Top Ten Authors by Number of Books Selected

1. William Shakespeare – 11

2. William Faulkner – 6

3. Henry James – 6

4. Jane Austen – 5

5. Charles Dickens – 5

6. Fyodor Dostoevsky – 5

7. Ernest Hemingway – 5

8. Franz Kafka – 5

9. Tied: James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf – 4

Book - After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order

After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (French: Après L'Empire: essai sur la décomposition du système américain) is a 2001 book by Emmanuel Todd. Todd predicts the fall of the United States as the sole superpower.

Todd examines the fundamental weaknesses of the US to conclude that, contrary to American conventional wisdom, America is fast losing its grip on the world stage in economic, military and ideological terms.

1976 prediction of Soviet collapse
Todd attracted attention in 1976 when he predicted, at 25 years old, the fall of the Soviet Union, based on indicators such as increasing infant mortality rates. In the late 1970s Todd was widely pronounced "anti-communist", just as, following the publication of "After the Empire", he has been attacked as "anti-American". He challenges these labels and describes himself as a historian and anthropologist first, and it was his concern as a historian rather than political passion that motivated him to write After the Empire. In late 2002 he believed that the world was about to repeat the same mistake that it had made in regards to the Soviet Union during the 1970s—misinterpreting an expansion in US military activity as a sign of its increasing power, when in fact this aggression masks a decline.

Post Cold War geopolitical climate
Todd writes that the United States became an empire not by strategy but by accident, following the sudden collapse of its main adversary, the Soviet Union. With the globalization of investment, it then indulged in the luxury of conspicuous consumption using incoming capital while going deeper and deeper into debt. In reality America is like a crumbling Roman empire - overextended with excessive arms spending, inequality and disgruntlement at home. To keep the rest of the world inline, and prevent its creditors calling in their debts, all America needs to do then was to wield a big stick.