The Top 75 New York Times Best-Selling Education Books of 2013

The Top 75 New York Times Best-Selling Education Books of 2013 ©

By DEBORAH HOFMANN
December 18, 2013 published by The New York Times ©

In lieu of a lesson on this last Wednesday before the holiday break, we asked Deborah Hofmann, the senior editor of the New York Times Best Sellers List, to create a special list for us of the top 75 best-selling education titles of 2013, and to explain how she defined and ranked books for this new category.

We hope it starts conversations, introduces you to new ideas and authors, and provides inspiration for teaching and learning well into 2014.

The Learning Network
Teaching and Learning with The New York Times

Reading List | The Top 75 New York Times Best-Selling Education Books of 2013


By Deborah Hofmann

Welcome to the debut of the New York Times Best-Seller List of Education titles.

This collection of eclectic and far-ranging titles is intended to get people talking and thinking about the many ways we discuss education, how we present sometimes arcane subjects, and how we think about teaching and learning at all ages and in many contexts.

The list was compiled by looking at every adult nonfiction title that was reported each week to the New York Times Best-Seller Lists though Dec. 7, in both print and electronic formats. This includes titles that were released in earlier years, but continue to enjoy sales; for this first experiment, we wanted to cast a wide net to see what turned up naturally.

I classified a title as “Education” after I examined multiple standard sources, including its industry identifiers, reviews and interviews, to create a sort of card catalog of titles that — to this editor’s sensibilities — spoke to an enduring appetite for books that try to teach the reader, or tell us how we learn or why we learn — or, sometimes, why we do not. There were no vetting experts or outside education consultants. Had that been the case, we might still be debating.

Although some titles are familiar for having made the traditional best-seller list that is published weekly in the Book Review, many of the titles are books that were reported, but perhaps often in quantities too low in any given weeks to qualify for the traditional rankings. Cumulatively over the months and in this subgroup, however, they emerge in clearer relief. They are ranked below by their relative reported sales, the same way we rank all books on the best-seller lists.

Please note that I chose not to consider for inclusion any titles that are actively tracked toward ranking among the Childrens’ Best-Sellers List categories, so you will not find classroom evergreens or coming-of-age narratives here.

One might argue that some of these titles are simply too narrow, too literal, or, in some cases, spoofery or farce. But isn’t argument what makes for lively hand-raising and calling out of turn?


1. America the Beautiful, by Ben C. Carson with Candy Carson
2. Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
3. How to Read Literature Like a Professor, by Thomas C. Foster
4. How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough
5. The Last Lecture, by Randy Pausch

6. The Signal and the Noise, by Nate Silver
7. Pathways to the Common Core, by Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth and Christopher Lehman
8. Far from the Tree, by Andrew Solomon
9. The End of Your Life Book Club, by Will Schwalbe
10. The Smartest Kids in the World, by Amanda Ripley

11. Reign of Error, by Diane Ravitch
12. How Music Works, by David Byrne
13. Charlotte Mason’s Original Homeschooling Series, by Charlotte Mason
14. The Autistic Brain, by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek
15. Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data, by Charles Wheelan

16. One World Schoolhouse, by Salman Khan
17. The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics, by Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky
18. F in Exams, Richard Benson
19. Letters to a Young Scientist, by Edward O. Wilson
20. On Writing, by Stephen King

21. NurtureShock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman
22. De-Textbook, by Cracked.com
23. F for Effort, by Richard Benson
24. The Whole-Brain Child, by Daniel J Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
25. Walk in Their Shoes: Can One Person Change the World?, by Jim Ziolkowski with James S. Hirsch

26. Teach Like a PIRATE, by Dave Burgess
27. What You’re Really Meant to Do, by Robert Steven Kaplan
28. Make Good Art, by Neil Gaiman
29. The Education of a Lifetime, by Robert Khayat
30. The Naked Roommate, by Harlan Cohen

31. Sticks and Stones, by Emily Bazelon
32. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, by Daniel C. Dennett
33. College (Un)Bound, by Jeffrey Selingo
34. Confessions of a Scholarship Winner, by Kristina Ellis
35. How to Create a Mind, by Ray Kurzweil. (Penguin)

36. Pandora’s Lunchbox, by Melanie Warner
37. Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger’s, by John Elder Robison
38. This Is Water, by David Foster Wallace
39. Heretics and Heroes, by Thomas Cahill
40. Instant Vocabulary, by Ida L. Ehrlich

41. Onion Book of Known Knowledge, by The Onion
42. Disney U, by Doug Lipp
43. Smithsonian Book of Presidential Trivia, by Smithsonian Institution and Amy Pastan
44. Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, by Mignon Fogarty
45. Things Come Apart, by Todd McLellan

46. Real Talk for Real Teachers, by Rafe Esquith
47. The School Revolution, by Ron Paul
48. What Great Teachers Do Differently, by Todd Whitaker
49. Why Teach? by Mark Edmundson
50. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, by Nicholas Carr

51.Shouting Won’t Help, by Katherine Bouton
52. Teach Your Children Well, by Madeline Levine
53. Big Book of How, by Editors of Time Magazine for Kids
54. Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt
55. Is College Worth It? by William J. Bennett with David Wilezol

56. Here Is Where: Discovering America’s Great Forgotten History, by Andrew Carroll
57. Art As Therapy, by Alain De Botton and John Armstrong
58. A History of Western Music, by J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca
59. My Bookstore, by Ronald Rice
60. Hello! My Name Is Public School, and I Have an Image Problem, by Leslie Milder and Jane Braddock

61. Thinking in Numbers, by David Tammet
62. Who Owns the Learning? by Alan November
63. Good Luck, Graduate, by Gregory Lang
64. First Class, by Alison Stewart
65. A Year Up, by Gerald Chertavian

66. Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
67. History’s Greatest Hits, by Joseph Cummins
68. Strings Attached, by Joanne Lipman and Melanie Kupchynsky
69. Hope Against Hope, by Sarah Carr
70. Learning by Doing, by Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker and Thomas Many

71. Teaching Mathematics for Social Justice, by David Stinson and Anita Wager
72. Information Dashboard Design, by Stephen Few
73. Fire in the Ashes, by Jonathan Kozol
74. What Your Third Grader Needs to Know, by Hirsch, E. D., Jr.
75. All Roads Lead to Austen, by Amy Elizabeth Smith

Sales of both print books and e-books are reported confidentially to The New York Times; retailers were not asked specifically about Education titles. The sales venues for print books include independent book retailers; national, regional and local chains; online and multimedia entertainment retailers; supermarkets, university, gift and discount department stores; and newsstands. E-book rankings reflect sales from leading online vendors of e-books in a variety of popular e-reader formats.

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The Western World and 21st Century Indulgences

The Western World and 21st Century Indulgences

“God Bless America” is the new United States mantra and economic planning model which needs total change and real introspection at each and every level from politics to economics, to war machines and education and to science and creativity. 

Oh I forgot, you have to believe in their "god", the god that certain leaders have decided is the official god of the U.S.A. Of course they are a country where church and state must always be separated but I digress.


Indulgences were sold by the Catholic church in the late Middle ages (1400 A.D. - 1500 A.D.) to persons seeking to ensure forgiveness for their earthly transgressions. Wealthy individuals of their time clamoured to have an indulgence granted before they passed on to the beyond.

Today those same types of "indulgences" are being “bought” by the world's wealthy not for safe passage to Heaven but as a means to finding ways to shelter their profligate share of the world's real wealth.

The “1-Percenters” of the 21st Century are creating their own charities and foundations most of which are named after the "donor" (their own names) so they can see how truly important they are to the world and their own money centric world. Charities of this type have increased by 25+ percent since the turn of the century.

These helping the world tax dodges are most prevalent in America where tax laws have been re-written to ensure the succession of family wealth through such shelters as capital gains laws andf other special tax provisions not afforded those struggling to make ends meet on a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour in the U.S. (35 hours * 40 hours * 52 weeks = $15,080 before any taxes are paid). The 1% individuals often pay less tax than the minimum wage individuals pay.

How long can the United States and the western world continue to abuse the majority of their citizens as the wealthy become even wealthier? Will there be "0.001-Percenters'?

American leaders extoll the virtues of “democracy” but the American people need to know that the countries in the world today best at weathering the capitalist hurricane caused by the finance industry are in fact “socialist” countries.

These “socialist” countries are feared as they must be seen as parasites because of their social and economic success, These world ending socialist countries successes have forced terrible diatribes on them by the Republican Party and in particular from the fascist wing of the Republican Party, the “Tea Party” would have Americans believe.

Those scorned “socialist” countries: Canada; Norway; Sweden; Australia and Germany are attacked by capitalists at every opportunity. Five years after the world finance storms  ( caused by over zealous American capitalists) laid waste to all but the elite wealthy, have done better than the rest of the world. It has been difficult but no one lost houses because of individual greed, no one leaves hospital with a $5, $500 or $50,000 hospital bill.

The truth is that our “socialism” is not the communist “ism” that many American politicians would have others believe it is. It is a kinder, caring and thoughtful system that still has many flaws but these “socialist” countries have the most stable economics and social systems of the 21st century.

Peter Buffet the authored a New York Times opinion piece on July 27, 2013

The Charitable-Industrial Complex - NYTimes http://nyti.ms/13PHgpr

Peter Buffet: “I’m really not calling for an end to capitalism; I’m calling for humanism.”

The United States, the land that took in the world’s refugees during the late 19th and 20th century has become a fortress country where the compassion and growth that lead to the greatest economic and social growth the world has seen is in danger of disappearing.

The country that cared about and for others must now learn to care for all the people that make their economy work. The time for finger pointing is over and moving on to the new United States must begin.

I fully support “God Bless America” but not in the selfish and self-righteous way that many people of the United States use this term and the inference it now represents based on the last thirty years of "me first" politics and economics.

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