Books in the Rear-View Mirror Are More Trivial Than They Appear

This week's Fortune magazine includes their list of the 75 best business books published since 1930 (the year the magazine was founded). I love lists like these (I even find the endless "100 Best Pop Whatever" shows on VH1 irresistible), so I immediately set to scrutinizing it. Leaving aside my mild annoyance over the fact that none of the books I've worked on was included (unlike some other similar lists that have been compiled over the years), I must say that I have my doubts about any list that supposedly covers the past 75 years but includes only 25 books published prior to 1990. What, all of the greatest business geniuses in history were born after 1940? I'm guessing that the Fortune list was developed either by editors aged 35 and below or by naifs unduly influenced by publishers' propaganda about their current crops of books.

Worth noting merely as an example of a phenomenon that's widespread in our publicity-driven age: historical myopia in which events of the present and the very recent past seem to loom far larger than events from a generation or two ago--not to mention a century ago, or a millennium ago. This visual impairment makes relatively recent trivia appear more significant than major milestones from the past, which are undeservedly forgotten.