46 Books that Changed the World

By april snellings , mentalfloss .com | jun 14, 2023, 9:04 am edt.

These books altered history in ways big and small.

Anyone who’s ever turned a page understands the potential for books to change the world in ways both large and small. Here, in no particular order, are just a few of history’s most influential tomes—and how they made humanity look at things in a new light.

1. Diamond Sutra

If we’re going to name influential books, we might as well begin with the oldest dated printed tome . On May 11, 868 CE —nearly 600 years before Gutenberg ever considered printing a Bible—a man named Wang Jie commissioned the printing of The Diamond Sutra , a Mahāyāna Buddhist “wisdom” text presented as a conversation between Buddha and his disciple, Subhuti, in Chinese. According to Susan Whitfield, then-director of the International Dunhuang Project at the British Library, “Printing was developed in China by the 8th century, and certainly by the 9th century, when this sutra was made, it was a refined art.” The 6000-word, nearly 16.5-foot-long scroll was found in 1900 in a secret library along the Silk Road in China; it was later taken to England by archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein. It now resides at the British Library, which calls it “one of the most influential Mahāyāna scriptures in East Asia.”

Wang Jie commissioned the book, according to Whitfield, because of one of Buddhism’s most important tenets: To do good deeds. “One of the ways of doing a good deed and gaining merit, and also sending out merit into the world for others, is by either copying an image of the Buddha, or by copying his words and transmitting them,” she explained in a 2007 talk. By unrolling the Sutra to read it, Wang Jie (or whoever possessed the Sutra ) would further spread Buddha’s teachings. “The Buddhists were one of the major groups that propagated and refined and developed printing,” Whitfield says, “because of the reason that they could realize multiple copies of prayers and other texts and that would be good for their religion.” —Erin McCarthy

2. Shakespeare’s First Folio

An open book that says "First Folio by William Shakespeare" next to a hand holding a skull

From shaping our ideas about what it means to be a teenager to inventing the modern name Jessica , William Shakespeare has shaped modern life in ways both subtle and dramatic. But without the First Folio, many of his most historically and culturally important works—including Macbeth, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar , and The Tempest —probably would not have survived.

First published in 1623 as Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies , the First Folio collected 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, half of which had never appeared in print. (During Shakespeare’s life, actors who performed his plays didn’t work from scripts; they were given lengthy parchments containing only the lines they needed to learn.) Of the plays that had been previously published, most existed only as fragile “quartos.” The First Folio was compiled and published by Shakespeare’s friends and colleagues and is almost universally considered the most accurate historical source for his work—and often hailed as the single most important book of literature ever produced. In October 2020, a copy sold to a private collector for nearly $10 million—the highest recorded price ever paid at auction for a literary work.

But the First Folio didn’t just preserve the Bard’s plays; Shakespeare scholars maintain that it was critical in securing his reputation as an important playwright in the years following the English Civil War. Thanks in part to the First Folio, Shakespeare’s plays were widely available when English theaters were desperate for material. As a result, his work popularized dramatic conventions, plots, and linguistic devices that would profoundly influence everything from Western literature to Bollywood cinema . —April Snellings

3. Aesop’s Fables

The universal themes at the heart of Aesop's Fables have resonated with readers for millennia. The simple stories use anthropomorphized animals to convey moral messages—like “slow and steady wins the race” (“The Tortoise and the Hare”) and “revenge is a double-edged sword” (“The Farmer and the Fox”). Even if you didn’t read the story collection growing up, you’ve likely heard some of the many expressions it popularized. Supposedly written in the 6th century BCE by an enslaved man who may or may not have existed , Aesop’s Fables is one of the older works on this list, but its lasting influence on our stories, language, and morality is unmatched. —Michele Debczak

4. Republic

“If any books change the world, Republic has a good claim to first place,” wrote Simon Blackburn in his 2006 book Plato’s Republic: A Biography . Republic introduces many of Plato’s most iconic ideas, including his thoughts on a perfect society, his ruminations on the definition and importance of justice, and the Allegory of the Cave; Blackburn points out that there are studies analyzing the influence of Plato on, well, almost every other book on this list. In 2001, it was voted the single greatest work of philosophy ever composed. That’s not to say everyone agrees with Plato’s conclusions; Philosophers’ Magazine editor Julian Baggini called Republic “wrong on almost every point” but still allowed that “without it we might not have philosophy as we know it.”

Plato - illustrated portrait. Greek philosopher, 428 - 347 AD.

Written sometime around 375 BCE, Republic is structured as a lengthy dialogue between Socrates and several other Athenian men (including Plato’s brothers). The conversation covers a lot of ground, ranging from the role of women in society (they’re just as qualified as men to be rulers and soldiers) to what kind of music upper-class children should listen to (definitely not the aulos ). But it’s primarily concerned with defining justice in both societal and personal terms, and proving that a just life is better and more satisfying than an unjust one. To make his point, Plato imagines an ideal state populated by three social classes: one that rules the state, one that guards it, and one that produces all the things the state needs.

Besides being the first major work of Western political philosophy and a foundational text of Western thought, Republic has been embraced by a wide range of influential figures throughout history. Martin Luther King Jr. named it as the one book (excluding the Bible, which the interviewer ruled out in the question) he’d want with him if he were stranded on a desert island [ PDF ]. “There is not a creative idea extant that is not discussed, in some way, in this work,” King said of Republic in a 1965 interview. On the other end of the spectrum, Mussolini was said to have always had a copy nearby, and The New York Times speculated that Republic might have influenced the Ayatollah Khomeini’s consequential reshaping of Iran. —AS

5. All Quiet on the Western Front

There had never been a war like World War I , and there had never been a novel like All Quiet on the Western Front .

The widespread use of trench warfare combined with devastating new weapons produced the bloodiest and deadliest fighting Europe had ever seen. The war claimed the lives of at least 9 million soldiers as well as millions of civilians; millions more were maimed by tanks, chemical weapons, and other new military technologies .

Erich Remarque

A decade after the war ended, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front became an instant sensation , racking up 1 million sales within a year in his native Germany and 800,000 more in Britain, France, and America combined. It wasn’t the first anti-war novel published, but it was the first to become an international bestseller, giving millions of readers a bleak and vivid account of modern warfare devoid of patriotic or jingoistic veneers.  

But Remarque’s novel—about a group of idealistic teenage boys who volunteer to fight for Germany toward the end of World War I, only to run headlong into the horrors and deprivations of war—would soon attract a very different sort of attention. All Quiet on the Western Front was published as the Nazis were coming to power, and they quickly set their sights on it, deeming it “a literary betrayal of the soldiers of the World War.” When Universal’s film adaptation opened in Germany in December 1930, a group of Nazis led by none other than Joseph Goebbels—Hitler’s future Minister of Propaganda—shut down a Berlin screening, setting off stink bombs, releasing mice, and viciously attacking audience members they thought were Jewish. In Vienna, thousands of Nazis attempted to storm a theater where the film was being shown. Hitler would later make it a crime to own the book, demanding that all copies be turned over for destruction.

Remarque himself managed to escape Germany with his life, but his younger sister wasn’t so fortunate: Elfriede Scholz was arrested and tried before ultimately being beheaded in December 1943. The judge presiding over her trial supposedly insisted she must “suffer for [her] brother.” —AS

6. Species Plantarum

Before Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published his then-definitive plant guide Species Plantarum in 1753, there was no formal system in place for naming plants and animals—which was a problem, considering how many species had been introduced to Western science in the preceding few centuries. Most researchers used a polynomial system in which each organism was given a sometimes-lengthy descriptive name. Besides being unwieldy, polynomial names had no standardized format and were often highly subjective, so one species might have been known by several different names. People went around giving organisms names like Solanum caule inermi herbaceo , foliis pinnatis incises (“solanum with the smooth stem which is herbaceous and has incised pinnate leaves,” if your Latin is rusty) and hoping someone would know they were talking about a tomato.

Carl Linnaeus

With Species Plantarum , Linnaeus showed the world an alternative: binomial nomenclature, which assigned each of the 6000 plants listed in the book a two-word name identifying it by genus and species (the tomato, for example, was dubbed Solanum lycopersicum ). Binomial nomenclature was quickly adopted throughout the scientific community; more than 250 years later, we’re still using it. Along with Linnaeus’s other pivotal work, Systema Naturae , Species Plantarum provided the foundation for scientific classification, forever establishing Linnaeus as the “the Father of Taxonomy.” —AS

7. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is generally recognized as the first widely distributed feminist text. The ideas posited by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792—that women possessed the same mental capacities and rational abilities as men, and therefore deserved the same rights—were downright revolutionary in late 18th-century England, where a married woman was often considered merely an extension of her husband. In her visionary (and often withering) polemic, Wollstonecraft argued that girls should be educated along with boys in a national, co-ed school system; that women should be paid the same as men; and that voting rights should be extended to women.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Vindication didn’t make many waves when it was first published . Most contemporary critics were either amenable to or casually dismissive of Wollstonecraft’s ideas. When it came to creating change, her explosive treatise had a long fuse. Across the Atlantic, Vindication helped inspire Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott to organize the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention , often viewed as the starting point of first wave feminism in the United States. Susan B. Anthony , who kept a portrait of Wollstonecraft hanging on her wall, identified herself as “a great admirer of this earliest work for woman’s right to Equality of rights” and serialized Vindication in her weekly feminist newspaper, The Revolution . —AS

8. The Origin of Continents and Oceans 

In 1910, German polymath Alfred Wegener’s friend got an atlas for a Christmas present. While looking through it, Wegener—like many before and since—was struck by the match between the coasts of South America and Africa, especially when comparing the continental shelves. He put the thought to the side—until the next year, when he came across a paper detailing a paleontological connection between the two. At the time, other scientists explained this away by theorizing that the continents were once connected by land bridges that had since sunk to the ocean floor. Wegener wasn’t satisfied with this theory, and in his 1915 book The Origins of Continents and Oceans , he posited a bold new idea: The continents as we know them today had once been part of a supercontinent he later dubbed “Pangaea.”

Alfred Wegener

Over millennia, Wegener speculated, this ur-continent had broken up into successively smaller chunks until we were left with the seven continents we recognize today. Wegener’s ideas about why and how this happened, though, were less than convincing: He suggested they were either flung apart (albeit slowly) by the Earth’s rotation or scooted around by tidal forces. Either way, he was pretty sure they just plowed through the planet’s crust until they got to wherever they were going. The scientific community was not convinced, and Wegener was widely ridiculed.

Over time, things changed. By the 1960s, Wegener’s controversial theory of continental drift had evolved into plate tectonics, which the University of California Museum of Paleontology describes as “one of the most important and far-ranging geological theories of all time.” The scientific revolution set in motion by Wegener’s controversial book has dramatically changed our understanding of the planet, with far-reaching implications for geology, climate science, evolution, and other fields. —AS

9. Don Quixote

An open book that reads "Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes" with a Quixote figure on a horse next to it

Miguel de Cervantes’s 1605 tale of a misguided idealist who fashions himself as a knight-errant satirized one kind of literature (chivalric romances) as successfully as it birthed a new one: the modern novel . Many of its story mechanics—the concept of the unreliable narrator chief among them—are still standard in today’s fiction, and 20th-century literary critic Lionel Trilling once commented that “it can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote .”

But Cervantes’s impact isn’t confined to literary spheres. “Every generation of intellectuals has seen its own preoccupations and its own most cherished discoveries anticipated in Cervantes’s text,” Cervantes expert Carroll B. Johnson said in a 2006 lecture [ PDF ]. “The rationalists of the 18th century discovered that Cervantes had anticipated them by writing the epic of good sense and social integration. The romantics of the next century discovered the opposite, that Cervantes had anticipated their own preoccupation with the tragic situation of the eccentric genius in a hostile society.” The list goes on, right up to our modern-day musings on the nature of reality: “Cervantes had discovered, or intuited, that reality is never a given, just out there, existing independently of us, but is always constructed by humans through socio-linguistic practice.” —Ellen Gutoskey

10. Giovanni’s Room

The early to mid-20th century was no place for frank discussions about being gay, which makes James Baldwin ’s Giovanni’s Room all the more remarkable. The 1956 novel explores the same-sex relations of numerous characters inhabiting post-World War II Paris. Its lead character, David, is preparing for marriage to his girlfriend, Hella, when he meets an Italian bartender named Giovanni. Their affair is complicated by legal troubles that threaten Giovanni’s very existence. David’s introspection toward his true sexual identity was uncommon for literature of the era: Baldwin brought it to the surface, using a literary reputation burnished by his first novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain , as currency for a controversial subject. Baldwin explained that it wasn’t an autobiography, but “more a study of what might have been or what I feel might have been.”

James Baldwin

That the book lent its gay character compassion wasn’t as troubling to some as the fact that Baldwin, a Black man, chose to write about a white cast of characters: The writer later said he “could not handle both propositions” of race and sexuality in the same book at that point in his life. However Baldwin needed to approach it, Giovanni’s Room stands as a courageous work—one that provided welcome company to readers waiting on a society to accept them. In Baldwin’s work, they were seen. —Jake Rossen

11. Common Sense

In January 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense , a 47-page pamphlet that galvanized American colonists to break from Great Britain by systematically laying out all the reasons why they should, was published. Not only was Britain doing a bad job serving its North American holdings, Paine explained, but monarchy was an inherently flawed system of government to begin with, and the colonists had a golden opportunity to build a completely new one run by and for the people.

Engraving of Thomas Paine by William Sharp After a Painting by George Romney

Paine’s arguments struck such a strong, patriotic chord among the general public that the Founding Fathers realized the only way forward was to hurry up and declare independence. John Adams said of the work in March 1776, “all agree there is a great deal of good sense, delivered in a clear, simple, concise and nervous Style.” (Though he wasn’t all positive—Adams was highly critical of Paine’s plan for the new government and noted the author “has a better Hand at pulling down than building.”)

Just as Paine had hoped, the American Revolution resulted in a whole new kind of self-governing nation—one that would inspire similar self-governance around the world. And Paine’s influence wasn’t confined to the United States: From 1792 to 1802, he lived in France, where he did his best to help the country implement and fortify a republican government, too (though admittedly that process was way more turbulent ). —EG

12. The Prince

Niccolò Machiavelli’s early 16th-century treatise on how to get and keep power is often boiled down to a couple key platitudes: the end justifies the means and it’s better to be feared than loved , neither of which appear in such stark terms in the book itself.

What Machiavelli does say about the former is that since people “are always taken by what a thing seems to be and by what comes of it,” a leader can operate knowing that whatever means he employs to “[conquer] and [hold] his state … will always be considered honest.” Regarding love and fear, Machiavelli expresses that because it’s tough for a ruler to be feared and loved, “it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two must be lacking.”

Portrait of Niccolo Machiavelli

Both instances reveal the underlying pragmatism present throughout The Prince , which sharply contrasted the idealism of many other political theorists of the era. In this way, Machiavelli essentially introduced a whole new lens through which to view politics.

“Machiavelli is famous, or infamous, for shifting the sense of ‘virtue’ from moral worth to effectiveness. The virtuous figures of The Prince are those who do whatever it takes to seize and maintain foreign territory, even if it entails the grossest violations. This is a morality, if that’s the right word, of ends,” Boston University history professor James Johnson said in a 2013 interview .

Robert P. Harrison , professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, put it even more simply back in 2009: “Machiavelli was the first theorist to decisively divorce politics from ethics.” —EG

13. Silent Spring

An open book that reads "silent spring by rachel carson" with an illustration of a dead bird next to it

“There was a strange stillness,” Rachel Carson wrote. “It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and the woods and marsh.”

In Silent Spring , Carson described the environmental harms of man-made pesticides with lyrical words and visceral truths. She exposed the destructive power of agricultural chemicals, which killed pollinating insects, polluted rivers and soil, and caused cancer in humans. Readers, including President John F. Kennedy, pushed for stronger environmental laws. “In the ‘60s, we were only just waking up to the power that we had to damage the natural world,” Jonathon Porritt, former director of Friends of the Earth, told The Guardian in 2012. “Rachel Carson was the first to give voice to that concern in way that came through loud and clear to society.” Directly or indirectly, the impact of Silent Spring can be seen in the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency, passage of the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act, and the modern environmental movement. —Kat Long  

14. The Art of War

Could a book about tactical warfare from around the 5th century BCE be relevant today? Without doubt. Author Sun Tzu’s 13-chapter treatise on combat strategy has had an application in everything from corporate battles to sports to politics to actual war. (It’s also, strangely, not very much of a warmongering tale: Tzu advocates for diplomacy whenever possible.)

More philosophical than instructional, The Art of War has influenced millions by its concise wisdom . “He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks” could apply to a military general or a sales team leader. But Tzu himself may not have been the sole author or even a real person. Not that it’s ever mattered to readers. Warfare is, after all, “the art of deception.” —JR

15. The Feminine Mystique

Published in 1963, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique challenged the popular notion that being a housewife and mother was a woman’s only path to fulfillment. Its radical message resonated with readers, and in its first three years of publication the nonfiction book sold nearly 3 million copies .

Betty Friedan

Many scholars credit Friedan for launching the second wave of feminism in the 1960s (which is not to say the book doesn’t have issues: It centers on the white, middle class woman and mostly ignores issues faced by Black and LGBTQ+ women). According to the National Women’s History Museum, The Feminine Mystique “gave voice to millions of American women’s frustrations with their limited gender roles and helped spark widespread public activism for gender equality.” —MD

16. Unsafe at Any Speed

For the first part of the 20th century, automobiles were viewed as an engineering marvel—but not necessarily a safe one. Accidents were common, and thanks to a lack of mandatory safety laws, features like seatbelts were typically ignored to trim costs. That all changed with Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile , lawyer and consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s 1965 polemic on the callous nature of the auto industry. Inspired in part by Rachel Carson ’s Silent Spring and its influential environmental message, Nader set out to do the same for the car world, describing automotive designs that ignored passenger safety.

Ralph Nader

The response was immediate: Less than a year after the book was published, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, establishing federal oversight that made sure automakers were adhering to new safety standards; state-mandated seat belt laws expanded . According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, seat belts saved 374,000 lives from 1975 to 2017.

Even those who had the most to lose from Nader’s crusade were impressed. “The book had a seminal effect,” auto executive Robert A. Lutz told The New York Times in 2015. “I don’t like Ralph Nader and I didn’t like the book, but there was definitely a role for government in automotive safety.” —JR

17. The Kinsey Reports

Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male , and its 1953 companion, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female , weren’t flawless reference texts on the subject of sexual habits. His data came from interviews with people—5300 men and nearly 6000 women—who weren’t even close to representing the American population as a whole: They were all white, for one thing, and there were outsized proportions of certain demographics, such as college students and incarcerated men.

Sexuality Researcher Alfred Kinsey

But both books, together known as the Kinsey Reports , did become bestsellers , spotlighting an appetite for more transparency when it came to sex. This helped lay the groundwork for the sexual revolution and paved the way for decades of further study into sex and gender. Kinsey’s researched also reinforced the idea that “exclusively heterosexual” and “exclusively homosexual,” in his terms, were just two points on a much more expansive spectrum; his “ Kinsey Scale ” accounted for people whose sexual experiences were “equally heterosexual and homosexual,” “predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual,” and more. Our modern-day understanding of sexuality is significantly more nuanced, but the Kinsey Scale was an influential jumping-off point. —EG

“It is a fantasy of the political future, and, like any such fantasy, serves its author as a magnifying device for an examination of the present,” wrote The New Yorker upon the 1949 publication of 1984 . That review could have been written yesterday. Though hardly a horror tale, Orwell’s novel—about writer Winston Smith, duty-bound to shift the truth to suit the domineering state—has long been a touchstone for warnings of dystopian futures.

George Orwell

The phrases big brother , doublethink , and newspeak all sprung from Orwell, who was seriously ill with tuberculosis while writing the book. (He died just months after it was published.) The story has become shorthand for gluttonous authority and elastic truth—or, in a word, Orwellian. —JR

19. Native Son

“The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever,” wrote literary critic Irving Howe in a 1963 essay for Dissent magazine. “Richard Wright’s novel brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear, and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture.”

Richard Wright

More than 80 years after the 1940 publication of Native Son , Howe’s comments still ring true. Wright’s first published novel, about a young Black man who accidentally kills the daughter of his wealthy white employer, was one of the first mainstream books to explore the personal and societal damage that systemic racism inflicts. It quickly rooted itself in America’s collective conscience, selling more than 200,000 copies in its first three weeks of publication and becoming the first novel by a Black writer to be selected by the influential Book of the Month Club. In 1971, Ralph Ellison called it “one of the major literary events in the history of American literature. And I can say this even though at this point I have certain reservations concerning its view of reality.”

Native Son was and remains a difficult book to read. The crimes committed by Wright’s protagonist, 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, are horrific and depicted in harrowing detail. But it isn’t sadism that initially drives him to acts of heinous violence; it’s a fear and hate of white people so intense it threatens to erase his humanity. But Wright wasn’t just condemning the Jim Crow South and its culture of fear and violence he’d fled in 1927; Native Son argued that even well-meaning white people benefitted from a fundamentally racist society and participated, whether they knew it or not, in the brutal oppression of Black people. For countless readers, Native Son marked the first time they’d been forced to consider the true, wide-reaching consequences of that oppression. —AS

20. Gray’s Anatomy

A reference book published in 1858 isn’t necessarily the kind of source you’d think would stand the test of time, but this illustrated guide to human anatomy is still considered “The Doctor’s Bible.” Surgeons Henry Gray and Henry Vandyke Carter’s collaboration was fairly short-lived—it took just three years for them to create the original text and woodcut images of a person’s insides—but formed the basis of an essential piece of any medical student’s education. More than 150 years later, Gray’s Anatomy has been in continuous publication ever since; it’s currently in its 42nd edition. —Jennifer Marie Wood

21. On the Origin of Species

On the Origin of Species is often called the greatest science book of all time. It introduced Charles Darwin ’s theory of evolution by natural selection to a wide audience, backed up by evidence he collected on his voyage to the Southern Hemisphere on the H.M.S. Beagle in the early 1830s and a further two decades of researching the scientific literature, experimentation, and consolidating evidence for his theory. Darwin wasn’t the only naturalist who had arrived at the idea that all life on Earth descended from earlier ancestors according to their fitness for survival; Alfred Russel Wallace spent years in Amazonia and Southeast Asia studying the local flora and fauna and came up with a similar idea. A letter from Wallace spurred Darwin to complete his work, and it was Darwin who became famous for the theory of natural selection—and bore the brunt of the fallout.

Charles Darwin

The book offended both religious and scientific minds. Prior to Darwin’s theory, many people believed the world was organized according to “natural theology,” a system in which species’ characteristics, designed by a benevolent Creator, were immutable. Religious leaders pushed back on the idea that humans could have evolved from animals rather than being created by God in his image. Some prominent scientists, like astronomer John F.W. Herschel and paleontologist Richard Owen , disputed parts or all of Darwin’s conclusions. Darwin did have his supporters, though, including physicist Thomas Huxley (who vigorously defended the work) and geologist Charles Lyell.

As time went on, Darwin’s theories were tested, and they held up to scrutiny. The public largely came to accept his evidence and conclusions. With natural selection, On the Origin of Species explained the mechanism responsible for species’ adaptation, providing the foundation for the modern field of evolutionary biology in an elegantly written form. As the Princeton University geneticist Lee J. Silver told Discover , “Darwin revolutionized our understanding of life.” —KL

22. The Jungle

An open book reading "the jungle by upton sinclair" with two cows next to it

A more nauseating , change-demanding novel could hardly have been imagined in the first decade of the 20th century—and that was the point of The Jungle . Upton Sinclair, a journalist and ardent socialist, wanted to expose the dangerous conditions, economic exploitation of workers, animal cruelty, and corporate monopolies in Chicago’s meatpacking industry. The Jungle humanized these offenses in the struggles of its protagonist, a Lithuanian immigrant, to make an honest and fair living in America. It was an instant bestseller. The book also bolstered support for progressive food safety laws such as the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, aimed at protecting consumers from adulterated or harmful products. Sinclair regretted that the novel did not have the same impact on improving labor conditions, however. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” he once wrote , “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” —KL

Whether you call it a historical novel, semi-autobiography, or, in the word of its author Alex Haley, “ faction ,” his 1976 book Roots: The Saga of an American Family sparked widespread interest in African American history and genealogy. The story follows a Gambian boy, Kunta Kinte, who is kidnapped in the 1760s and brought to America, where he and his descendants suffer generations of enslavement.

Author Alex Haley

Haley suggested that Roots was the story of his own family and ancestry, though some scholars argued with the veracity of his claim. Nevertheless, the hit book was turned into an eight-part TV miniseries in 1977 that made an even bigger splash , with more than 130 million people tuning in . Roots prompted Americans to look back on their own stories with a clearer lens. —KL

24. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

Young adults around the world have pored over the pages of Anne Frank’s diary , an intimate window into the life of a young teenager facing the horrors of the Holocaust that has sold more than 30 million copies in nearly 70 languages since it was published in 1947 . It can be hard to picture the terrible day-to-day experiences of life during such a terrible time; Anne’s diary, written over the course of two years that she and her family spent in hiding in the Secret Annex, makes that era of history feel undeniably vivid and real. On August 1, 1944, Anne wrote her last entry, and three days later, the family was discovered. Anne died of typhus at Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. The only person from the Secret Annex to survive the Holocaust was Anne’s father, Otto, who would go on to publish her diary.

Millie Perkins And George Stevens

One of the most widely read nonfiction books in the world, The Diary of a Young Girl has inspired everyone from Nobel Peace Prize winner and activist Malala Yousafzai to Nelson Mandela. It’s incredibly important today —not just because many Holocaust survivors have passed away and are no longer able to tell their own stories, but because, in the words of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “ The Diary of Anne Frank is the first, and sometimes only, exposure many people have to the history of the Holocaust. … Anne has become a symbol for the lost promise of the more than 1 million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust.” —Kerry Wolfe

25. A Dictionary of the English Language

For eight years , Samuel Johnson and a handful of assistants crammed into the garret of 17 Gough Square in London. On cold days, they huffed warm breath onto their hands to heat their fingers as they worked, paging through books and noting how words were used. Their work was tedious, but it culminated in the 40,000-entry A Dictionary of the English Language .

Though Johnson is known as the “Father of the English Dictionary,” he wasn’t actually the first person to write a dictionary. But he did, as Lynda Mugglestone , a professor of the history of English at the University of Oxford, tells Mental Floss, “turn dictionary making on its head.”

Samuel Johnson - English

Many previous lexicographers sought to preserve a language as it was. Their authors defined words and aimed to essentially freeze a language in time, without paying much regard to how the masses actually used the words contained within. Johnson, too, was approached to compile such a tome by a group of booksellers. “It's a very prescriptive model of a dictionary that he's in essence invited to write,” Mugglestone says. “But that's not the kind of dictionary he does write.”

Instead, Johnson created a more descriptive dictionary. “Johnson's method moved into much more what we might see as a democracy of words, going out and finding evidence,” Mugglestone says. He pored over a rich assortment of material, plucking words from everything from the works of Shakespeare to people’s personal letters to find evidence of how people used the language. He drew upon a mix of classic literature and everyday domestic sources, and even cited work by women writers in his research—a radical move at the time. (That said, according to one analysis , “of the 114,000-odd quotations in the Dictionary, fewer than thirty … are from female authors.”) Even today you can see evidence of his, well, evidence; some of the annotations he created while researching for the dictionary still exist within the books he read.

Johnson’s work is also incredibly nuanced. He does more than give a single definition for each word. “He provides an extraordinary wealth of labels whereby we can see, OK, not only does the word exist in English, but we can see which context, which meanings are used,” Mugglestone says. Johnson’s dictionary lists alternate spellings, and he notes which words are phasing out of or creeping into the English language.

A Dictionary of the English Language is packed with evidence and nuance. But it’s also surprisingly personal. Johnson sprinkles quotes and musing throughout the text, remarking upon the words themselves and the process he undertook to create the dictionary. “There’s a human story of someone in the really upper cold territories of a historic house, working with his assistants in this enormous space of time,” Mugglestone says. “There are very few dictionaries where we can get behind the print text to such an extent.”  —KW  

26. The Iliad

Homer’s the Iliad is, according to LaTrobe University professor Chris Mackie, typically regarded as “the first work of European literature.” The tale is epic—in every sense of the word. It’s believed the lengthy poem about a brief period within the Trojan War dates to between the 8th and 7th centuries BCE (6th century at a push). The Iliad captured elements passed down via a long tradition of oral history and helped shape Greek culture in the years that followed. It influenced ancient scholars and artists , and even, as the BBC notes , “changed the way people worshipped”: Homer’s saga described the Greek gods and introduced heroes that remain legendary today, thousands of years after the poem was penned. —KW

27. The Color Purple

An open book reading "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker with a purple flower next to it

A cultural marvel for Black female-led literature, The Color Purple won Alice Walker both the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the 1983 National Book Award for hardcover fiction, making her the first Black woman to win either. The Color Purple detailed struggles with identity, independence, and oppression within the Black female experience—and it was challenged as unfit for schools as early as a year after its publication. In 1984, a California high school cited it as having “troubling ideas about race relations, man’s relationship to God, African history, and human sexuality.” While “troubling” is up to interpretation, the story undoubtedly sparked some controversial conversations about race, religion, gender, and sexual fluidity.

But what some deem controversial, others deem comforting: The Color Purple resonates with Black women in part due to its effort to break down the “ strong Black woman ” trope. The Black female characters in the book exemplify vulnerability and paint Black women in a soft light that many have historically tried to harshen. The stress Walker places on the importance of fostering relationships with other Black women in a setting with “us against the world” conflicts exemplifies the sense of community created within marginalized groups. —Bethel Afful

28. The Lord of the Rings

If you're a fan of Skyrim , Game of Thrones , or Dungeons and Dragons , thank J.R.R. Tolkien . The British author revolutionized the modern fantasy genre when The Lord of the Rings —his adult-oriented follow-up to the children’s book The Hobbit —became a global sensation.

From 1954 to 1955, the epic story (which Tolkien considered one work) was released in three installments: The Fellowship of the Ring , The Two Towers , and The Return of the King . Though it didn’t invent dwarves, elves, or wizards, the book launched a new movement.

The Grave of ''Lord of the Rings'' Author J.R.R. Tolkien

According to John Garth , the author of The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien and Tolkien and the Great War , fantasy as a marketing label “didn’t exist” prior to Tolkien. “You would see books marketed as romance in the old sense of the word—not meaning a love story, but meaning an adventure in which improbable things happen,” he tells Mental Floss. “Fairytales had kind of died off with the First World War, and Tolkien set about rescuing the fairy story from that death knell. What he did was he took fairy stories and made them heroic, and used them to process his feelings about what was going on in the contemporary world—particularly the First World War.”

Publishing companies were hungry to recreate the success of The Lord of the Rings . New books labeled “high fantasy” flooded stores, and their influence began to bleed into other areas of pop culture. “This huge popularization of fantasy novel led in other strange directions, surprising directions,” Garth says. “Roleplaying games— Dungeons and Dragons in particular—are inspired by that fantasy genre as a whole, but obviously by Tolkien too. Then right on into computer gaming, so all the roleplaying games that people play now can be traced back to Tolkien’s impact on publishing—and arguably too, of course, the huge rise in science fiction and fantasy movies.”

The Lord of the Rings has been around for nearly 70 years, and the ubiquity of high fantasy adventures across mediums shows its influence is still strong today. —MD

29. The Interpretation of Dreams

Sigmund Freud’s 1899 book introduced some of his most famous concepts to the public. In it, he posited the existence of an independently functioning “unconscious mind” that expresses itself through dreams.

Sigmund Freud

While Freud’s theories on the purpose and significance of dreams are met with scrutiny today , the influence of The Interpretation of Dreams is undeniable; many scholars credit it with laying the foundation for modern psychoanalysis and dream interpretation. —MD

30. The Communist Manifesto

An open book reading "Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx" with a hammer and sickle next to it

“A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.” So begins The Communist Manifesto , Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s 1848 exploration into the political theory of how major societal changes are often linked to historical class struggles.

Split into four sections, the pamphlet helped define the core tenets of communism as it existed in the mid-19th century and serves as a foundational text for what would later become known as Marxism . It also functions as a document of a revolutionary era, aligning the communist movement with the then-novel idea of democracy, which the Revolutions of 1848 (which occurred in Germany, France, and other parts of Europe) were predicated upon.

“It’s a document of a time when new possibilities [seemed] more and more realistic,” Drew Flanagan , Assistant Professor of History and Director of the History and Political Science program at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, tells Mental Floss.

After falling into relative obscurity following the 1848 Revolutions, the Manifesto was reclaimed—and subsequently reinterpreted—by revolutionary political movements emerging around the world by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the Bolshevik party of Russia during the October Revolution of 1917 and the Communist Party of China during the Chinese Communist Revolution . “People decades later were the ones who really picked this up, not so much people in the mid-19th century,” Flanagan says.

Given the historical significance of those communist-led revolutions, it would be easy to trace the roots back to Marx and Engels and specifically to the Manifesto , which predates Das Kapital (1867), another influential work penned by Marx. But Flanagan notes that it’s important to look at the Manifesto through its historical context, and to separate the ideas Marx and Engels laid out in their work from how it was understood and used in subsequent centuries.

Still, for folks in the modern era, the Manifesto remains prescient given that many societal issues that Marx and Engels identified in it (like class-based inequality) are still ongoing, and because it offers—whether one fully believes in its ideology or not—a vision of a different kind of democracy. “One of the reasons why the Manifesto matters for [modern-day] activists, but also for others, is that it contains an encapsulation of Marxism,” Flanagan says. In that way, it serves as “a primer for activists, and therein, I think lies a lot of the key to its impact. [In] reading the Manifesto , I could imagine an activist feeling like this has a sort of moral clarity and directness that’s very appealing. And the general picture of a society that’s dominated by ownership and by a capitalist class is one that arguably is very relevant.” —Shayna Murphy

31. A People’s History of the United States

School textbooks are often construed as the objective truth, but reality is often far more complex. That was the point o f A People’s History of the United States , Howard Zinn’s 1980 tome on the events that shaped the country’s past as told from the view of the historically oppressed: women, immigrants, and underrepresented groups; vaunted figures like Lincoln and Roosevelt were portrayed with blemishes.

Howard Zinn

While not universally praised—sometimes criticized as “leftist propaganda,” it’s regularly made banned book lists, and some historians criticize it as just being bad history —Zinn’s work has led to renovated study curriculums and prompted generations of students to question the accepted narrative.  — JR 

32. The Second Sex

Although French writer and social theorist Simone de Beauvoir didn’t consider herself a philosopher, her groundbreaking 1949 work, Le Deuxième Sexe (translated as The Second Sex ) is regarded by many modern-day scholars as one of the most influential existentialist texts ever printed.

As an exploration into society’s treatment of women, de Beauvoir ’s book simultaneously sheds light on historical myths surrounding womanhood while also debunking commonly held misconceptions related to contemporary gender norms and sexuality (whole books have been written on the single sentence “ On ne naît pas femme: on le devient ”). Yet throughout, her work is imbued with the principles of existentialism—the belief that every individual, regardless of sex or gender, has the right to self-determination and should be able to “take on the individual responsibility that comes with freedom,” according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Simone De Beauvoir

The book was initially published in two volumes, with some chapters appearing in Les Temps modernes ( Modern Times ), a journal de Beauvoir co-founded with philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, the latter of whom she had an open romantic relationship with for about 50 years. The Second Sex was condensed for its 1953 English translation , and although it was banned by the Vatican until 1966, it helped pave the way for other quintessential second-wave feminist works, including Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique , which was published in 1963.

Credited by The New York Times with “creating modern feminism in a single, electrifying stroke,” de Beauvoir’s magnum opus would go on to resonate in other culturally significant ways, too. In 1986, screenwriter Daniel Waters began work on what would later become the 1989 teen-comedy satire Heathers . Yet part of his inspiration for the script came years earlier, when he came across a copy of The Second Sex while still in high school.

“I thought this was great stuff for a movie, the way girls maintain their own oppression,” Waters told The New York Times in 1989. “I’m sure I'm the only person who ever read that book and said, ‘Hey, there’s money to be made.’” And with that, one could argue that The Second Sex helped inadvertently launch a whole sub-genre for teen comedies, including not only Heathers , but 2004’s Mean Girls (which Waters’s younger brother, Mark, actually directed).  —SM

33. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do

How do everyday workers feel about their jobs? In this landmark 1974 oral history, writer and historian Studs Terkel set out to discover exactly that. Over the course of three years, he interviewed more than 130 men and women across the U.S.—including teachers, farmers, actors, supermarket workers, housewives, and even a gravedigger—about how they earned a living, but more importantly, whether or not they actually enjoyed it.

The end result is a work that, in Terkel’s words, is as much about “a search … for daily meaning,” as it is about “daily bread,” and about the hunger for “a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Studs Terkel

In a 1974 review , New York Times writer Marshall Berman described Terkel’s oral history as symbolic of the American Popular Front idealism of the era—as in, “a vision of a genuinely democratic community” filled with people from every race, class, and occupation, all striving to overcome barriers by finding solidarity within each other’s common struggles—while also crediting it with giving rise to a new type of idealism, one “more honest and genuine” about the working world, and reflective of people’s changing attitudes toward their professional lives.

Modern scholars have argued that Working functions as an important time capsule of sorts, showcasing “an old 20th century way of doing business,” as The Chicago Tribune put it , before the advent of the Information Age. Sometime around 2014, Radio Diaries and Project& gained exclusive access to the tapes of Terkel’s Working interviews and co-produced a series on them for NPR. Others have since linked the oral history to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the struggles faced by essential workers during quarantine, suggesting that as much as the book reflects change, Working ’s overarching intent—to amplify the voices of ordinary folks searching for value and meaning within their jobs—remains as timely today as it ever was.  —SM

34. Frankenstein

An open book reading "Frankenstein by Mary Shelley" with a hand next to it

The origin story of Frankenstein is nearly as famous as the novel itself. In 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley spent the summer in Switzerland with Lord Byron and John Polidori. The story goes that one rainy evening, Byron challenged the group to a ghost story contest. After an initial bout of writer’s block, Godwin came up with an idea that would cement her as the clear winner. She started writing her novel about a monster made up of reanimated body parts at age 18 and had it published at age 20. In addition to creating one of the most iconic characters in literature (and later film ), Mary Shelley is credited with inventing the science fiction novel and shaping the modern horror genre. —MD  

35. Gone With the Wind

Published in 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s first and only published novel was a sensation unlike anything else encountered before. The tome—which clocked in at just over a thousand pages and weighed about 3.5 pounds— sold 1 million copies within the first six months of its release and later earned the Pulitzer Prize for Novel (later Fiction) in 1937.

While a 2014 Harris poll revealed that it’s still among America’s favorite books of all time, the Civil War and Reconstruction-era set novel has also seen its fair share of detractors over the years, with many critics arguing that the book (and its 1939 film adaptation ) helped propagate dangerous myths surrounding the antebellum south, the “ Lost Cause ,” and the notion of “contented” slavery. In her 2022 book The Wrath to Come: ‘Gone with the Wind’ and the Lies America Tells , author Sarah Churchwell refers to it as “a thousand-page novel about enslavers busily pretending that slavery doesn’t matter—which is pretty much the story of American history.”

Not only that, but the book’s defense of the Ku Klux Klan and reliance on racial caricatures (like the “ mammy figure ”) have been widely condemned in recent years; in 2020, HBO Max (now Max) even briefly removed the film adaptation from its catalog, citing its “racist depictions” of Black characters. In an interview with CNN, author Alice Randall—who wrote The Wind Done Gone , a 2001 retelling of Gone With the Wind from the perspective of a former enslaved person—described the original book’s use of racial caricatures as “poisonous,” and noted that within her own work, she was attempting to “create an antidote to the poison” and push back against the “myth of Black intellectual inferiority,” which Gone With the Wind helped to perpetuate.  —SM

36. How to Win Friends and Influence People

The title may sound trite, but Dale Carnegie’s 1936 self-help book about gaining confidence and trust, which is based on his lectures, has won over readers and influenced them for decades. The advice inside is obvious: smile more, talk less, listen a lot. Yet for tens of millions, it has resonated. Warren Buffett once hung his certificate from Carnegie’s course in his office; Charles Manson was reportedly also a reader. —JR   

37. Ain’t I A Woman?

In her speech at the 1851 Akron, Ohio, women’s rights convention, Sojourner Truth—a formerly enslaved woman—asked white suffragettes whether she qualified as a woman in their eyes, as she didn’t share many of the qualities that defined their version of womanhood. Many women at the center of the suffrage movement advocated for their own rights and left women of color as an afterthought, and Truth’s speech provided an important critique of feminism during its first wave. (Though it’s likely that she never asked the famous question. The version of Truth’s speech published in 1851 doesn’t have it—the closest it gets is “I am a woman’s rights.” Then, 12 years later, Frances Gage published her recollections of the speech, seemingly changing Truth’s likely Dutch-accented speech patterns to Southern speech patterns—as well as many of the words—and having Truth say “ar’n’t I a woman?” The ain’t variant had become popular by the 1880s.)

Sojourner Truth

Published in the waning point of feminism’s second wave, bell hooks’s book, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism , continues Truth’s dissection of the gender binary through a racial lens, asserting that race and gender are part of the same animal. hooks’s examination of racism and sexism as an intertwined force helped foster conversations of intersectionality and inclusivity throughout the third and fourth waves of feminism. —BA

38. Grimms’ Fairy Tales

The fairy tales and other folk stories collected and published by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in a series of seven editions throughout the early to mid-19th century are important for the very simple reason that they’re still ubiquitous in Western culture today: A new adaptation of Hansel and Gretel or Snow White materializes seemingly every time you blink.

But they aren’t only important for that reason. In fact, initially, the Grimms weren’t trying to produce globally popular entertainment—or entertainment at all. They were German academics who collected German folklore not only to preserve it, but as a means of fostering a national identity among the many fractured demographics scattered all over a not-yet-unified Germany.

Portrait of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

“[The Grimm brothers’ collecting] had everything to do with ‘artistically’ creating a German popular culture rooted in the belief systems and customs of the German people,” Jack Zipes wrote in his 2014 book Grimm Legacies : The Magic Spell of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales [ PDF ].

Their work inspired folklorists all over Europe and North America to do the same. These collectors began traveling around on the hunt for folk stories that hailed from oft-overlooked and under-represented parts of their countries.

“Not only did educated middle-class collectors give voice to the lower classes, but they also spoke out in defense of their native languages and in the interests of national and regional movements that sought more autonomy for groups with very particular interests,” Zipes explained. In this way, compiling folk stories was “a social and political act.” —EG

39. Hiroshima

Most readers who picked up the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker had no way to prepare themselves for what was inside. The cover illustration depicted a carefree summer day at the park, but the editors had devoted virtually the entire issue to war correspondent John Hersey’s devastating account of the horrors wrought by the bombing of Hiroshima. Hersey’s narrative focuses on the experiences of six survivors—an approach inspired by Thornton Wilders’s 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey .

For most readers, Hiroshima was the first accurate account of the suffering caused by atomic warfare. Before it, Americans had only gotten watered-down, highly censored reports of the destruction caused by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Congress had even been told that radiation sickness was “a very pleasant way to die.” Hiroshima aggressively dismantled those lies with stomach-churning descriptions of the vast human suffering caused by the bombings. 

The issue sold out almost immediately, and Hersey’s story was quickly printed in book form by Alfred A. Knopf; the influential Book of the Month Club gave a free copy of its edition to almost a million subscribers on the grounds that hardly anything in print “could be of more importance at this moment to the human race.” Full radio readings were broadcast in several countries, and newspapers around the world printed it, with editorials insisting that Hersey’s story be read. Thanks to Hersey, writes author Lesley M.M. Blume, the horror of nuclear war was now “a matter of permanent, policy-influencing international record.” —AS

40. Things Fall Apart

An open book reading "Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe" with yams next to it

Before Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, the story of the European invasion and colonization of Africa had been told almost entirely from the perspective of white writers and historians. Nigerian author Chinua Achebe changed that with his debut novel about a respected member of an Igbo clan whose life unravels after he kills a boy in the village. Partly conceived as a response to the reductive and racist depictions of African characters in some popular books of the time, Things Fall Apart was one of the first African novels to achieve global acclaim, and one of the first widely read works to explore the devastating impact of European colonization. It laid the groundwork for African literature as we know it today and helped dispel the notion of Africa as “the Dark Continent.”

Philosopher and ethicist Kwame Anthony Appiah has called Things Fall Apart “a starting point for the modern African novel.” To ask how Achebe influenced African literature, Appiah wrote, “would be like asking how Shakespeare influenced English writers or Pushkin influenced Russians.” —AS

41. De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ( On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres )

One can hardly blame Nicolaus Copernicus for holding off on publishing his revolutionary work De Revolutionibus for more than a decade after it was technically finished: The book, which he had labored over from 1515 to 1532 before revising and finally sending it off to be published in 1543, sought to upend beliefs—both scientific and religious—held since the 5th century BCE : That the Earth was at the center of the universe and all other heavenly bodies moved around it. Copernicus argued that the Earth and its Moon, along with all other heavenly bodies, revolved around the Sun. In a foreword to the volume addressed to Pope Paul III, Copernicus wrote, “I can readily imagine, Holy Father, that as soon as some people hear that in this volume, which I have written about the revolutions of the spheres of the universe, I ascribe certain motions to the terrestrial globe, they will shout that I must be immediately repudiated together with this belief.”

Nicolaus Copernicus

Copernicus wasn’t the first to hold this view, but unlike his predecessors, he worked out the details using math rather than physics (the title page even reads “Let no one untrained in geometry enter here”). He got certain things right—arguing, for example, that the Earth spun on its axis as it traveled around the sun and said that wobbling of the axis caused equinoxes. He also got things wrong: His system isn’t particularly simpler or better than the old geocentric model (that would have to wait for Johannes Kepler).

Copernicus didn’t live to see the effects of De Revolutionibus : He died in May 1543, reportedly rousing just long enough before passing to hold his book. As expected, he was widely criticized, and De Revolutionibus was eventually banned by the Vatican. It would take another century for Copernicus’s idea to become accepted, but De Revolutionibus would eventually influence the likes of Kepler and Galileo on the way toward upending everything we thought we knew about our corner of the universe. —EM

Henry David Thoreau went into the woods outside Concord, Massachusetts, in 1845 because he wished to “live deliberately.” The two years he spent in a homemade hut on the shore of Walden Pond—with frequent excursions to town, visits from friends, and a trip to climb Maine’s Mt. Katahdin—were an experiment in transcendentalism, in which he hoped to show that it was possible to work much less and live much more.

Henry Thoreau

Walden, or, Life in the Woods shows Thoreau putting the transcendental values of self-reliance, civil disobedience, individualism, and the spirituality of nature into practice. It was a moderate seller upon its publication in 1854, but since then, its influence on American identity and ideas has grown. Walden articulated the rationales behind social justice, environmental conservation, and individual conscience in ways that are ever more relevant to our times. —KL

43. The King James Bible

While not the first English translation of biblical texts, the King James translation has become the most storied. Published in 1611 after a group of 47 scholars translated the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha from Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the King James translation standardized the Bible into a text that was constant within churches and the home. Before its publication, the Bishop’s Bible was read in churches, and the Geneva Bible was read in domestic settings, and disparities led people to question the true meaning of the text.

Now, the King James Bible is the most widely printed English book in all of history. Christians across denominations have referenced it in sermons over the centuries, and the text itself even remains culturally relevant in secular spaces. In the words of the BBC , “No other book, or indeed any piece of culture, seems to have influenced the English language as much as the King James Bible.” Its poetic imagery and cadence lent itself to references in music and art across the centuries, from classics like Handel’s Messiah to contemporary references like in The Simpsons. —BA

44. How the Other Half Lives

The 19th century saw an extraordinary wave of immigration to the U.S. In the 30-year period from 1870 to 1900, nearly 12 million immigrants landed on U.S. shores. Many of them settled in New York City, where they lived at the mercy of predatory employers and slumlords who charged exorbitant rates for housing in filthy, appallingly overcrowded tenements. In 1890, journalist, photographer, and lecturer Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives , an incendiary exposé of living conditions in New York’s slums. Riis, a police reporter and an early pioneer of flash photography, had gone into the tenements himself to document the conditions there.

Jacob August Riis

The response was immediate and dramatic. Riis’s book became a bestseller, offering readers what was often their first glimpse at the lives of impoverished workers and their families. Not long after it was published, Riis received a message from U.S. Civil Service commissioner Theodore Roosevelt: “I have read your book, and I have come to help.” When Roosevelt went to New York to head up the city’s Board of Police Commissioners, he made good on his promise. Besides purging the NYPD of corrupt officers, diversifying the police force, and instituting firearms training for the city’s police, Roosevelt shuttered the city’s police lodging houses and, according to Roosevelt biographer Kathleen Dalton, “set up a new system of municipal lodging houses, which was what Riis had wanted for years.” Riis’s book also prompted New York officials to begin the process of improving living conditions in the city’s tenements.

How the Other Half Lives is considered a fundamental work of muckraking journalism, and it demonstrated the power of photography to inspire social change. It became a formative influence for prominent activists to come, including labor secretary Frances Perkins , who was a key figure in establishing Social Security, the minimum wage, and other pivotal New Deal reforms. —AS

45. The Wealth of Nations

Open book reading "The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith" with a pile of coins next to it.

Few books can define an entire society. When they do, it’s not often with any brevity. The Wealth of Nations , Scottish economist Adam Smith’s massive tome on economic policy, arrived in 1776 with a thunderclap. (Or something close, provided you dropped it on the floor.) As the late journalist P.J. O’Rourke put it, Smith describes three basic tenets of financial prosperity for a country: freedom of trade, labor division, and owning up to one’s own self-interest. (“Even intellectuals should have no trouble” with the basic concepts, O’Rourke noted.) With division of labor comes trade; with trade (hopefully) comes wealth. That wealth was not simply piles of cash, Smith wrote , but in the products bought and sold in a competitive marketplace—an idea that countered the conventional thinking of the era, which was that hoarding was best and importing or exporting goods was to be avoided.

Would someone have voiced support for hese basic tenets of classical economics if not for Smith? Most likely—indeed, others were working on similar ideas. And while historians debate the myths and misunderstandings surrounding the work, it is still The Wealth of Nations that became the by-word for the entire free-market economic system. —JR

46. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

When Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was published in 1970, America was already in a period of extraordinary civil unrest. The Kent State shootings and the Augusta civil rights riot had occurred in May; details of the Mỹ Lai massacre were still coming to light, and distrust of the federal government was high. Hitting bookstores just two years after the 1968 establishment of the American Indian Movement, Dee Brown’s book was a radical retelling of the country’s history, centering its narrative on Indigenous people rather than European settlers and their descendants, with a focus on the American West.

At a time when the average white American’s views of Native Americans was shaped more by Hollywood Westerns than reality, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee forced people to reconsider the popular narrative of westward expansion and its fallout. It wasn’t just Americans of European descent who were jolted by the book; Brown’s bestseller is credited with setting the stage for a wave of Native American activism. Some historians draw a straight line between the book and the Wounded Knee occupation that began in February 1973, which resulted in the shooting deaths of two Native American men at the hands of federal agents.

Many historians think Brown overcorrected, portraying Native Americans as passive victims, and some have taken the book to task for creating the impression that Native American history essentially ended with the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. But its lasting impact is undeniable; when Brown died in 2002, The Guardian called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee the book that “demolished for ever the heroic myth of America’s conquest of the west.” —AS  

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Five Three_Ratio_Guardian_Review_Peter_Judson

Ten books that changed the world

From Euclid’s Elements to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, and from Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to Shakespeare First Folio … 10 authors choose books ‘not of an age, but for all time’

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

“Unsatisfied, cold, priapic, nymphomaniac, lesbian, a hundred times aborted, I was everything, even an unmarried mother,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir of the reaction to the second volume of The Second Sex . This outpouring of angst – which included the Vatican placing the book on its banned list – was brought on by De Beauvoir’s frank discussion of female sexuality, including lesbianism and cross-dressing. But there is so much more to The Second Sex , which asks the most fundamental question in the whole of feminism: what does it mean to be a woman?

De Beauvoir rejects biological essentialism – a woman is more than a womb – and instead investigates the nebulous quality of femininity, leading to her most famous dictum: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Woman, she observes, is the Other, the exception, the oddity – allowing Man to become the unexamined default form of humanity. De Beauvoir compares women’s oppression to that of Jews, the US’s black population, the proletariat and colonised nations, but she concludes that sexism is a unique force because women live with, even love, their oppressors.

Simone de Beauvoir. Photograph: Rex

From these theoretical underpinnings, she offers a panoramic sweep through women’s lives: work, motherhood, representation in literature, economic independence, sexuality, ageing and the boredom of cleaning the dust behind the wardrobe. (Housework “is holding away death but also refusing life”, she observes, which is my new go-to explanation for the filthiness of my fridge). De Beauvoir’s prose is piercing, aquiline; she is unapologetic about its intellectual demands. Her answers are simple, but endlessly elusive: women must be educated like men, paid like men, and given unfettered access to birth control and divorce. Women must be treated like full human beings, as men are.

Unsurprisingly given its scope and force, The Second Sex was a publishing sensation. It sold 22,000 copies in its first week in Paris in 1949, and its English translation was an immediate bestseller in America. It has influenced feminists as divergent as Betty Friedan, Judith Butler and Audre Lorde. Its reputation has survived better than many of the second wave works it inspired, although in a 2010 review of the new translation, Francine du Plessix Gray criticised De Beauvoir’s “paranoid hostility toward the institutions of marriage and motherhood... [which] is so extreme as to be occasionally hilarious.” Modern feminism is also less judgmental about any woman who adopts stereotypically feminine mannerisms or clothing – such as “fragile” high heels that “doom her to impotence”. But De Beauvoir was well aware of the contradictions and complications of her own position, hence the epigram to the second volume, from her lover Jean-Paul Sartre ’s play Dirty Hands : “Half victims, half accomplices, like everyone else.” Helen Lewis

The Analects by Confucius

To understand China, first we have to understand Confucius’s Analects . Written more than 2,400 years ago, the book underpins the cultural structure of China. Unlike the Bible and Qur’an, which focus on spirituality, the Analects is a practical account of the human order of things: family loyalty, moral virtue, social hierarchy and politics. If you are Chinese, lines from the Bible such as “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” can only bewilder you, as Confucius said nearly the opposite: “It is only the truly virtuous man who can love and hate others.” Hate is a necessary moral stance for a Chinese man.

Growing up in China , I remember in middle school having to recite lines from the Analects : fu mu zai, bu yuan you, you bi you fang – meaning: “The Master said, ‘While his parents are alive, the son may not venture far abroad. If he does go abroad, he must have a fixed place of abode.’” Such mottos have shaped Chinese value systems and cemented a feudal society lasting millennia.

Confucius (551-479 BC). Photograph: Apic/Getty

The life of Confucius remains obscure but tantalising. Although he was an important politician within the state of Lu around 500BC, he exercised no military power. His career was interrupted by a power struggle within Lu, partly caused by the conflicts of the warring kingdoms. Confucius left Lu and became an exile, spending the rest of his days wandering from one kingdom to another, all the time instructing and inspiring disciples. His vision of the world emphasised the strong ties between the authority and a man’s moral duty. One can understand why Confucianism has been employed by all emperors throughout China’s history, including leaders of the Communist party. Chinese autocracy clothes itself in the core teachings of the Master: “The mind of the superior man is conversant with righteousness; the mind of the mean man is conversant with gain.” The emperor would speak of himself with such aphorisms to bolster his right to rule.

The book provides rich discourses on the qualities of a noble man and rules of a functional society that have aided autocratic rule, surely, but they also provide the modern reader, even in the west, with food for reflection on how to live. To take one Confucian kernel: “A man should say: ‘I am not concerned that I have no place. I am concerned with how I may fit myself into one. I am not concerned that I am not known. I seek to be worthy of being known.’” Xiaolu Guo

The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Darwin wasn’t the first to propose that species have mutated through time; the idea of evolution has been around in some form or other since the ancient Greeks. But it was Darwin – and, simultaneously, Alfred Russel Wallace – who worked out natural selection as the mechanism by which evolution worked.

The Origin of Species put cats among pigeons and rattled clerical cages. Darwin knew it would; that’s why the book is so quiet and steady and reasonable, why it builds incrementally. This is “just one long argument”, made from ordinary things designed to appeal to the good sense of his readers: Darwin asks us to consider bees, pigeons, worms and hedgerows, to look around us and judge with our own eyes. “There is grandeur in this view of life,” he wrote, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Four or the species of finch observed by Darwin on the Galápagos Islands. Photograph: Getty

It isn’t just zoologists and biologists who have explored and developed Darwin’s propositions. The work of political theorists, sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers has been shot through with Darwinian ideas, particularly the notion of competition for survival. “The history of all hitherto existing society,” the Communist Manifesto opens, “is the history of class struggles.” Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland explored the comedy of the relationship between humans and their animal kin. By the end of the century, authors such as HG Wells were exploring the darker aspects of the Darwinian vision – the bestial underside of human nature.

The book changed the way we think about the world. It demonstrated that the diversity of the natural world could be explained without recourse to supernatural agency and proposed instead that it had been shaped by chance collisions and incremental changes through billions of years. It also showed us that the Earth is not preprogrammed to progress. Species that outgrow themselves risk extinction, not because they are being punished for their hubris but because they are making themselves unfit, destroying the means of their own survival. “We are all netted together,” Darwin wrote. In confronting the daunting challenges of the coming decades, this may be his most important lesson. Rebecca Stott

Elements by Euclid

Written in Alexandria around 300BC, Elements is a 13-book treatise whose 465 theorems lay down what the Greeks knew about geometry at that time. Highlights include a proof of Pythagoras’s theorem , and proof that there are an infinite number of prime numbers.

Sexy, huh? Well, yes. Elements is the most important maths book of all time not because of the subject matter, but because of its revolutionary method. The book invented how mathematicians do mathematics. Elements begins with a list: 23 definitions, five postulates and five common notions. The definitions describe the geometrical objects Euclid will be writing about, such as points and lines. The postulates tell us the procedures that are allowed, for example, that given any two points you can draw a line between them. (Euclid allows us only what we can draw with a straight edge and a compass.) And the common notions clarify basic concepts, for example, that if object A is the same as object X, and if object B is the same as object X, then object A is the same as object B.

From that moment on, Euclid assumes nothing else. He builds up from these simple basics to construct a remarkable edifice of mathematical knowledge. All the theorems in Elements are deduced logically from his small set of assumed truths. The beauty in Elements is in its rigour and ingenuity. It establishes a standard for mathematical proof to which every subsequent mathematical work aspires. Unlike other sciences, where new models and theories supersede earlier ones, the theorems in Elements remain as true now as they were in ancient Greece. Indeed, some of them – such as Pythagoras’s theorem – are taught at GCSE .

The book was translated from Greek into Latin, and also into Arabic, where it initially had a much greater influence in Islamic culture and science. The historian of mathematics Carl Boyer, writing in the 1960s, estimated that, since its first printing in 1482, more than a thousand editions had been published: “Perhaps no book other than the Bible can boast so many editions, and, certainly, no mathematical work has had an influence comparable.”

Not everyone was a fan. Arthur Schopenhauer complained that Euclid’s proofs were overcomplicated: “a brilliant piece of perversity”. If you were to dip into it now, you may not find it an easy read. Euclid wasn’t interested in being pretty or accessible; he was interested in constructing a system that was watertight. And there has been barely a leak in 2,500 years. Euclid is the only great mathematician not credited with the discovery of an important theorem. His reputation is not based on what he did, but on how he did it in Elements . Alex Bellos

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

When the young law student Hanns Sachs first opened The Interpretation of Dreams , his life changed. It was a “moment of destiny”, wrote the future analyst, like meeting a “femme fatale”. Many of Freud ’s early circle describe a similar epiphany, yet today this 800-page book tends to have a less dramatic impact. The long series of prefaces and the extended and rather arid first chapter on the history of dream interpretation put off many readers. Nevertheless, Freud was right to feel that he had written something momentous (he even imagined a plaque to commemorate where the “secret of dreams” had been discovered).

To reduce this secret to the ubiquitous formula “A dream is a fulfilment of a wish” does this complex book little justice. Freud distinguished between a wish and a desire. A dream can be organised around a wish – say, to pass an exam – and unconscious desire will act like a hitchhiker, using the wish to smuggle itself into the dream. We might pass or fail the exam, but the clues to desire lie in the details of the room we are in, the tie the examiner is wearing, the sounds in the background. These seemingly unimportant elements allow us to track unconscious material.

Freud shows the central place of sexuality and violence in our mental lives. Writers and poets have always been alert to the troubling and darker sides of the psyche, but it was the dream book that showed so carefully how exactly these currents are forged and encrypted, how they undergo distortion and censorship and how they are formed and shaped by language. The detail of the famous Chapter 7 on the psychology of dream processes is unparalleled, and its discussion of the relations between perception and consciousness puts most of today’s neuroscience to shame.

The danger of the book was quickly apparent to Freud. Just as a femme fatale can lead you astray, so the book could set readers on a fruitless quest for hidden symbolism. All his later work on dreams was an effort to correct this. The search for hidden meaning is ultimately unhelpful, and, as he wrote in 1899, there is a navel to the dream, a point that cannot be interpreted and where meaning fails. The dream book opened up both of these worlds to future generations: that of meaning, so exciting to the early analysts, and that of non-meaning, crucial to the whole intellectual landscape of the 20th century and beyond. Darian Leader

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

“There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot,” wrote Aldo Leopold in the foreword to A Sand County Almanac . “Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them … For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.”

Aldo Leopold. Photograph: Starker Leopold/Aldo Leopold Foundation

A Sand County Almanac , first published in 1949, a year after its author’s death, is one of the most influential books about the natural world ever published. It helped to transform what had been an essentially conservative, utilitarian conservation movement into the first stirrings of an ecologically centred green movement in the west.

Leopold was a lifelong conservationist who lived for much of his life on a farm in the “sand counties” of Wisconsin. A lifetime of watching land across the US undergo “violent conversion” from wilderness to human use had convinced him that conservation was no longer enough: humanity needed a new ethical relationship with land and the non-human things that lived on it.

Leopold’s great achievement was the development of what he called this “land ethic”. “A thing is right,” he wrote in the Almanac , “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Those two words – “biotic community” – were what made this outlook so radical, then as now. Humans, said Leopold, whatever they might like to think, were not above nature: they were part of it. They could either understand that and act accordingly, or they could continue to destroy, and probably perish themselves.

Back in 1948, even conservationists saw their task as opening up wilderness areas for hunters. Leopold himself had been part of this work as a young man. In the Almanac, he tells the story of the day he shot a she-wolf and watched “the green fire” die in its eyes. “I was young then, and full of trigger-itch,” he writes. “I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer , that no wolves would mean a hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”

The chapter in which Leopold tells this story is called “Thinking like a Mountain”. Leopold believed that humans must learn again to think like mountains; that we must shift our self-image “from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it”, and that we could only do that by paying close attention. Leopold’s “nature” was not a concept or a debating point. Nature was the green fire in the eyes of the wolf, the skeins of geese across the sand county lakes, the flowering of the Arizona juniper or the bark of the young white pine. You had to step outside to see it, and you had to remain humble. It is a lesson we still have to learn.

Paul Kingsnorth

The Communist Manifesto by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx

“A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe ... ” that was how the first, botched attempt to translate the Communist Manifesto into English began. In the authorised version it reads “A spectre is haunting Europe”. And, in a different guise, the same spectre has haunted Europe at moments of crisis ever since Marx and Engels wrote it.

It is not the spectre merely of working-class revolt: the factory workers of Manchester had been organising revolts for 30 years before the Manifesto came out. The threat was political: that working-class unrest would detach itself from the spontaneous ideology of the early 19th century – republican socialism – and embrace communism instead. Communism, for Marx’s generation of German leftists, meant a classless society based on abundance. Marx and Engels had inherited the objective from the atheist left intelligentsia of the 1830s, but, after Engels arrived in Manchester in 1842, they came to understand the industrial proletariat as the only social force capable of achieving it.

But the Manifesto is not about the proletariat. Its whole first section is a eulogy to capitalism, which has played a revolutionary role by replacing all partial and informal attempts at a market economy with a pure one. Not only that, it is a eulogy to the bourgeoisie. If you only ever read one paragraph of the work itself, it should be this:

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

The business class of the early industrial era, then, had brought about not only the conditions for constant technological improvement, but the demise of religious obscurantism and the emergence of sociological realism. From now on Marx and Engels thought – observing the acute social war raging in cities such as Lille and Manchester – the only problem would be to equip the proletariat with the political maturity to wield power.

The Manifesto was published a few weeks before the 1848 revolution in France, and shipped via Paris to Germany, where a full-scale revolutionary war promptly broke out. Here the minuscule communist sects, composed of skilled workers and radical students, found themselves having to side with radical democrats against, first, the toppled monarchy and then the bourgeoisie, which, on first sight of armed workers, became distinctly un-revolutionary.

From then on, all revolutions became a dirty business for communists, involving the complex interplay of radical social objectives and radical democratic ones, around which the alliance of class forces was often unstable. But the manifesto has shone through, in large part because its prose shines with unsullied logical clarity. Capitalism produces its own gravediggers and gives them the means to free themselves, and humanity, from economic necessity. As an idea it was powerful enough to sustain generations of people through the experience of exile, torture, imprisonment and concentration camps. Paul Mason

Beloved by Toni Morrison

“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children.” When Beloved was published in 1987, and I saw these opening lines, plunging the reader into a house haunted by a murdered girl, I knew that I wasn’t ready to read it. It may seem surprising when I confess that, despite being a female African American writer, and this being the book that has best and most famously captured the female African American experience, I didn’t actually read it until two years ago. Why?

Toni Morrison. Photograph: Tim Knox for Saturday Review

Partly I wasn’t ready to face what the novel had to tell me. I felt instinctively that Toni Morrison had broken open a hell as no one – not even great writers such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Alice Walker – had done before. She achieved with Beloved what her four previous books had only hinted at: she put you there. To read it is to live in the haunted Ohio house of Sethe, the escaped slave who had decided to kill her child rather than let her go back into slavery. It is to enter the mind of Denver, her daughter, attempting to find some kind of equilibrium in a nation that hates her very being; and to meet Paul D, a man who has survived slavery’s horrors and who hopes that stability can be a route to reconciliation.

But there was another reason it scared me, too: Morrison’s voice was so powerful and intuitive that to read her work was to risk being subsumed into her influence. A subsequent generation of artists, from Darryl Pinckney to Eryka Badhu , from Henry Louis Gates to Zadie Smith and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , are in her debt, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. I’m not saying that they are imitating Beloved ; it’s that this novel opened up a way of seeing, a way of accessing the world that is now everywhere.

I finally read the book because I was writing a memoir and I wanted to understand how my mother and my grandmother saw the world. Sure enough, I found that the novel articulates the deep rage that many black women feel: the rage of impotence, the impossibility of protecting your child and yourself. Beloved makes the ghost of the little dead child a cri de coeur for all lost children. No writer who ventures on to this terrain can do so without “knowing” this novel. It has left the realm of fiction and become a force of nature. Bonnie Greer

Comedies, Histories & Tragedies by William Shakespeare

The Shakespeare edition that Nelson Mandela read on Robben Island.

Imagine the world of literature without “All the world’s a stage”, without “Beware the Ides of March” and Brutus stabbing Caesar; without Malvolio’s yellow stockings and cross-garters; without Cleopatra in her infinite variety and Lady Macbeth in her dark charisma; without a voice for Caliban and the thought that “We are such stuff as dreams are made on”. That would be the world without Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories & Tragedies , published in large-scale double-columned folio format in 1623.

Half the plays of the world’s greatest writer survive only because of this book. Were it not for the Folio , several others would only be known in mangled, partial texts. Seven years earlier, in the year of Shakespeare’s death, his friend and rival Ben Jonson became the first English playwright to collect his works, but great comedian and fine poet that he was, Jonson’s range was limited. As the title of the First Folio indicates, Shakespeare excelled in every kind of drama: comedies to make you laugh, historical plays to make you think, tragedies to make you cry.

Actually the title of the Folio is misleading. Each of the plays is multiple, not singular in kind. There is comedy in the tragedies, tragedy in the comedies, and history everywhere. All human life is there: kings and clowns, women on top and brothers in arms, scurvy politicians and ne’er-do-wells, best mates who fall out with each other because they have both fallen in love with the same girl, parents raging at old age and difficult children, young men and women struggling to come to terms with their sexuality, people who get depressed and those who go mad, friends who show undying loyalty and envious schemers who revel in malice. Not to mention ghosts, fairies, ethereal spirits and Olympian divinities.

And then there are the words: the memorable phrases, the coinages and combinations, the wit-combats of Beatrice and Benedick, the deep meditations of Hamlet, the soaring poetry of Othello and Cleopatra, the hilariously inventive prose of Sir John Falstaff. No book has ever done more with the resources of human language.

The Folio was the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays. Almost every great thinker and many a great doer in the last 400 years has had a collection of Shakespeare to hand and has in some way been shaped by it. Freud said that psychoanalysis was merely the scientific redescription of things he had learned from Shakespeare’s characters. Marx learned as much about the power of money from Timon of Athens as from the world around him. Abraham Lincoln would read Shakespeare aloud for hours at a time with a single secretary for audience, Nelson Mandela and his fellow-inmates kept a copy of the complete works hidden in Robben Island. As Ben Jonson wrote in a wonderfully generous poem included in the prefatory matter, this is a book “not of an age, but for all time”. Jonathan Bate

Originally, biblia meant “books”. Greek-speaking Jews and Christians used the word as a shorthand for their scriptures: a vast treasury of texts written at various times, in various places, and in various styles. Jews, naturally, had no patience with the four accounts of Jesus’s life, the history of the early church and the corpus of letters ascribed to various apostles that, some four centuries after the lifetime of Jesus, had come to be canonised by Christians as a New Testament. There was little disagreement, though, as to what constituted the great core of scripture known to Jews as the Tanakh and to Christians – unsurprisingly – as the Old Testament. A collection of laws believed to have been authored by God himself; a history of the world from its creation through to the rise and fall of various empires in the near east; books of prophecies, of poetry and of proverbs: biblia indeed.

Yet both Jews and Christians, in their differing ways, identified in these multifarious scriptures a profound and inner coherence. In the middle ages, the Greek plural biblia was transfigured into a Latin singular: no longer “books” but The Book. The change was due reflection of the centrality of the Bible to medieval culture. The Reformation, which saw it translated into numerous vernaculars, only boosted its impact on the way that European Christians thought, imagined and spoke. The spread of western power across the globe took the Bible to lands unimagined by its various authors. Today, its status as the world’s all-time bestseller is uncontested. No book in history can rival it for influence.

There is, though, a close second. The Qur’an , like the New Testament, bears the recognisable stamp of Jewish scripture. Moses is named in its verses more than any other person, and its doctrine of prophecy derives ultimately from the Hebrew Bible, but its precepts are much more forceful and potent than biblical ones. Muhammad is not believed by Muslims to have been the author of the Qur’an. Rather, he was its passive recipient. The qur’anic text, so Islam teaches, is timeless and uncreated, and it is this that explains the echoes it contains within its verses of both the Old and New Testaments: the Qur’an came first. As the pure and unmediated word of God, it is believed by Muslims to be immune from all error. Everything in it is held to be true. As a result, the Qur’an has been even more central to Islamic civilisation than the Bible was to Christendom. “We have sent it down, blessed. Follow it and guard yourselves, so that you may receive compassion.” Without a book from God, so the Qur’an teaches, there can be no knowledge of right or wrong, nor of what it means properly to be human. It is in Islam that the book has attained its ultimate apotheosis. Tom Holland

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The 20 most influential books in history

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What’s the most influential book you’ve ever read? For most of us, that’s a tough call to make. But that was the question put to the public ahead of Academic Book Week . An expert panel of academic book-sellers, librarians and publishers nominated 200 titles, and members of the public were asked to vote online for their top 20.

Many of the books that make up the final 20 are hundreds – in one case thousands – of years old, proving that the best works really do stand the test of time. How many of these classics have you read?

influential-books (3)

1. On the Origins of Species

Author : Charles Darwin Published : 1859 Why you should read it : It’s simple: “No work has so fundamentally changed the way we think about our very being and the world around us,” says Alan Staton, head of marketing at the Booksellers Association .

2. The Communist Manifesto

Author : Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Published : 1888 Why you should read it : As Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood says , this is more than just a manifesto: “It’s not just a uniquely influential document in the theory and practice of revolutionary movements throughout the world; it’s also a work of history, of economic, political and cultural analysis, and of prophecy.”

3. The Complete Works

Author : William Shakespeare Published : The plays were first published between 1594 and 1634 Why you should read it : Elizabethan poet Ben Jonson said that Shakespeare was “not of an age but for all time”. He wasn’t wrong. Centuries later, Shakespeare’s plays are still by far the most studied and performed in the English-speaking world and beyond.

4. The Republic

Author : Plato Published : 380 BC Why you should read it : Not only is it an important piece of work from one of the most influential philosophers, it’s also very readable. “Plato did not write philosophy like a dry textbook – he wrote it like a living conversation,” says Robin Waterfield, a classics scholar .

5. Critique of Pure Reason

Author : Immanuel Kant Published : 1781 Why you should read it : It’s not an easy read. But British philosopher A.C. Grayling thinks the effort more than pays off: “Kant’s book requires a degree of concentration to be understood and appreciated, but it richly repays close study both for its own sake and because of the far-reaching nature of what it suggests.”

6. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Author : Mary Wollstonecraft Published : 1792 Why you should read it : At a time when revolutionaries were demanding equal rights for all men, Wollstonecraft demanded those rights be extended to women: “The book laid out the tenets of what today we call ‘equality’ or ‘liberal’ feminist theory,” says Anne Mellor , a professor of women’s studies.

7. The Wealth of Nations

Author : Adam Smith Published : 1776 Why you should read it : Smith’s book has been described as “the foundation of economics, the origin of econometrics and the intellectual cradle of capitalism”, all of which are as relevant today as they were when he wrote it.

8. Orientalism

Author : Edward Said Published : 1978 Why you should read it : Said’s book sought to reveal the West’s patronizing and largely inaccurate understanding of Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, and how these views help to “mobilize fear, hatred, disgust and resurgent self-pride and arrogance – much of it having to do with Islam and the Arabs on one side and ‘we’ Westerners on the other”. Unless you’ve been living under a rock since September 2001, you’ll understand why this book is as pertinent as ever.

9. Nineteen Eighty-Four

Author: George Orwell Published : 1949 Why you should read it : “It’s much more than a book – it’s a novel of huge social and political significance that’s never going to date,” says Abe Books , especially in an age of digital surveillance. Is Big Brother watching you?

10. The Meaning of Relativity

Author : Albert Einstein Published : 1922 Why you should read it : Einstein said his goal with the book was to give an insight into the theory of relativity to interested non-experts. This work does exactly that: “Nobody is better at explaining relativity than Einstein himself; his account provides a combination of depth and clarity that only he could confidently produce,” writes Tom Siegfried of Science News .

11. The Second Sex

Author : Simone de Beauvoir Published : 1949 Why you should read it : Times have changed for women since this book was first published. But Beauvoir’s central argument that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” and her detailed examination of women throughout history still makes for a compelling read.

12. The Rights of Man

  Author : Thomas Paine Published : 1791 Why you should read it : Paine was “an original thinker, far ahead of his time,” says John Belchem of the University of Liverpool . The Rights of Man , written while Paine was taking part in the French Revolution, addresses issues – poverty, inequality, welfare – that are still hotly debated today.

13. A Brief History of Time

Author : Stephen Hawking Published : 1988 Why you should read it : It tackles one of the biggest and most intriguing questions: where did we come from and where are we going? “I wanted to explain how far we had come in our understanding of the universe: how we might be near finding a complete theory that would describe the universe and everything in it,” writes Hawking .

14. Silent Spring

Author : Rachel Carson Published : 1962 Why you should read it : When Carson, a former marine biologist, took on the chemical industry and revealed the damage pesticides were doing to the planet, she probably didn’t know how much of an impact her book would have. Described as “one of the most effective books ever written”, it paved the way for the modern environmental movement.

15. The Female Eunuch

Author : Germaine Greer Published : 1970 Why you should read it : Even to this day, both Greer and her book divide feminists. And perhaps that’s why it made it on to this list: it still gets people thinking about and debating important issues. “Her insights, while not always strictly accurate, offer revelatory analysis, and in a language so searing it galvanizes us to reflect more deeply on the status of women and the nature of gender relations,” writes Zohra Moosa of Mama Cash .

16. The Prince

Author : Niccolò Machiavelli Published : 1532 Why you should read it : The Prince provided aspiring rulers with a guide on getting power and holding on to it. “It may give readers an insight into the mindsets of leaders caught taking an ends-justify-the-means approach,” whether that be politicians or your boss .

17. Ways of Seeing

Author : John Berger Published : 1972 Why you should read it : Berger’s book, based on a BBC television series, explores the way women and men are represented in culture, and how these representations influence the way they act. Thirty years after its release, the Independent described it as “a rare example of that much-claimed title, the trailblazer”.

18. The Making of the English Working Class

Author : E.P. Thompson Published : 1963 Why you should read it : History is written by the victors, as they say. Which is why history books tend to be dominated by royalty and aristocrats. Thompson’s book departed from that tradition: “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the obsolete hand-loom weaver, the utopian artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity,” he wrote in the preface . The impact was immense : “The book set the terms of reference for much labour history that followed.”

19. The Uses of Literacy

Author : Richard Hoggart Published : 1957 Why you should read it : With all the talk of income inequality – how it’s increasing, the many problems it spawns – Hoggart’s book about the working class is well worth a revisit: “Despite the social and economic transformations, thousands still recognize the life depicted – we should be closer to a classless society, but are not,” wrote Anita Sethi for the Independent .

20. The Naked Ape

Author : Desmond Morris Published : 1967 Why you should read it : In this bestseller, Morris, a zoologist and ethologist, explores the human species by comparing them with other animals. He’s published follow-up books, but it’s this first one, and its “irresistible blend of hard science and populism” that still gets people talking .

Have you read? 18 books Warren Buffet thinks you should read 17 books Bill Gates thinks you should read

Author: St éphanie Thomson is an Editor at the World Economic Forum

Image: Thomas Lecky, department head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s, holds a first edition of Charles Darwin’s book “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” during a preview at Christie’s auction house in New York June 13, 2008. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

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Melvyn Bragg is a writer and broadcaster whose first novel, For Want of a Nail , was published in 1965. His novels since include The Maid of Buttermere, The Soldier's Return , A Son of War, Credo and Now is the Time , which won the Parliamentary Book Award for fiction in 2016. His books have also been awarded the Time/Life Silver Pen Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the WHSmith Literary Award, and have been longlisted three times for the Booker Prize (including the Lost Man Booker Prize). He has also written several works of non-fiction, including The Adventure of English and The Book of Books about the King James Bible. He lives in London and Cumbria.

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10 times fiction changed the world

From stunning eco-fiction to iconic feminist literature , these remarkable novels have all inspired change through the power of great storytelling.

Tiled jackets of fiction books that have changed the world, in Vintage Earth-themed colour scheme

A group of eco-activists sit around a campfire in a Pacific Northwest forest, discussing how they can convince the rest of the world to join their cause. Their newest recruit, a psychologist named Adam, suggests, ‘The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.’

This scene from Richard Powers ’s The Overstory could very well be describing itself: the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has been praised by readers ( including Barack Obama ) for changing how they think about the Earth.

It makes perfect sense, then, for The Overstory to be one of eight titles in the new Vintage Earth series of novels which aim to transform our relationship with the natural world. Each book in this series is a work of creative activism, a seed from which change can grow, from The Wall by Marlen Haushofer – cited as an influence by Nobel Prize-winners Doris Lessing and Elfriede Jelinek – to The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey , a founding member of XR Writers Rebel .

But the climate crisis isn’t the only space where fiction holds sway. Inspired by the Vintage Earth series, here is a look back on some other moments when a good story has sparked real-world change.

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (1837)

The image of a young orphan holding out his bowl for more gruel is so engrained in our cultural consciousness that it’s almost easy to forget that Charles Dickens was drawing on reality when he wrote Oliver Twist .

Under the New Poor Law of 1834, government welfare for the impoverished was only available to those who chose to enter the workhouse. Supposedly there to provide clothing, food and shelter, these institutions were in fact described by contemporary critics as ‘prisons for the poor’, with families separated from one another, meagre rations and discharge hard to obtain.

Dickens made his disapproval of the New Poor Law clear in his satirical portrayal of Oliver’s workhouse – a message which his contemporary readers could hardly miss. While there was no demonstrable shift in legislation due to Oliver Twist , the novel caused outcry over workhouse conditions, bringing the plight of the poor into the drawing rooms of the Victorian upper classes. As Dr Heather Shore, social history expert at Leeds Metropolitan University, puts it : ‘All of a sudden [Dickens] moves the debate on because now people, when they want to talk about criminal children they can think about the Artful Dodger – they know who these children are through Dickens’s fiction.’

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1905)

Set amongst the immigrant and working-class communities of turn-of-the-century Chicago, Upton Sinclair’s provocative exposé of the meatpacking industry is one of the clearest examples of fiction bringing about direct change to society.

On publication, The Jungle was immediately denounced by the conservative press as un-American libel, not least because Sinclair advocated for Socialism and unionisation. Sinclair’s clear objective was to reveal the exploitation of factory workers, however, his readers had a different takeaway from the novel: they were enraged to learn of the unsanitary conditions under which their food was produced.

In response, then President Theodore Roosevelt arranged an investigation of Chicago-based meatpacking facilities. The team’s findings went on to inform the Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection acts of 1906, transforming the industry’s sanitation standards. Sinclair was disappointed in this result, saying, ‘I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.’

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928)

Radclyffe Hall’s story of upper-class Englishwoman and ‘sexual invert’ – aka lesbian – Stephen Gordon was the subject of one of the most famous obscenity trials in British legal history. Despite the efforts of publisher Jonathan Cape and support from the literati including Virginia Woolf , E. M. Forster , Lytton Strachey and Vita Sackville-West , the novel was found to be obscene on the basis that it might ‘deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences’.

However, if the court’s intention was to prevent discussion of lesbianism, their efforts backfired. The publicity surrounding the trial reached more readers than The Well of Loneliness ever would have achieved alone: now the topic of lesbianism was being discussed in newspapers up and down the country. The allure of a banned book also led to rallying support in the States, where the novel triumphed in a further obscenity trial.

Called‘the bible of lesbianism’ by The Times , for many women throughout the twentieth century The Well of Loneliness was their first – or only – encounter with lesbian literature. The book became a common reference point in butch communities, particularly in the States: American historian Lillian Faderman recalls one post-war article that even claimed Hall as ‘Our Matron Saint’ of lesbians.

1984 by George Orwell (1949)

Big Brother. Doublethink. Room 101. Thought Police. 2 + 2 = 5. The language of George Orwell’s 1984 has been applied to just about every current event of the past decade, from Brexit to vaccine passports, fake news to drone surveillance.

Set in a future society kept under mass surveillance, controlled by a Party who dictate their own version of reality through constant propaganda, the classic dystopian novel has been hailed by many modern readers as alarmingly prophetic. The New York Review of Books called it ‘enthralling and indispensable for understanding modern history’.

Orwell’s name dominates talk around authoritarianism and liberty, with thinkers all over the political compass claiming him as a supporter. You would be hard-pressed to find a conversation on freedom of speech that doesn’t reference 1984 . No wonder, then, that the BBC named 1984 as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World .

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)

Things Fall Apart is widely considered to be Chinua Achebe’s magnum opus, as well as a definitional work in both African and World Literature. The story follows Igbo champion wrestler Okonkwo as his village and world are unbalanced by the arrival of European colonisers and missionaries.

Following its publication in 1958, the book became one of the first works of African literature to achieve global acclaim, changing perceptions of European colonialism. Achebe was praised for his handling of sociopolitical themes and for his innovative writing, blending the English language with Igbo words and narrative structures. Nelson Mandela described him as ‘a writer in whose company the prison walls fell down’.

The success of Things Fall Apart paved the way for future authors from the African continent. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said that Achebe’s work ‘influenced not so much my style as my writing philosophy: reading him emboldened me, gave me permission to write about the things I knew well’. Or, in Achebe’s own words, ‘The popularity of Things Fall Apart in my own society can be explained simply . . . this was the first time we were seeing ourselves, as autonomous individuals, rather than half-people, or as Conrad would say, “rudimentary souls.’’’

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)

When creating the misogynistic regime of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale , Margaret Atwood didn’t have to look far for inspiration: its horrors were drawn from real life. In fact, most of Atwood’s sources can be traced directly, via her archive of newspaper clippings kept at the University of Toronto.

Almost four decades since the novel’s first publication, we are regrettably still seeing similar headlines around reproductive freedoms and women’s rights. The only difference is that, nowadays, this coverage often name-drops Atwood.

The Handmaid’s Tale and its various adaptations are now a lingua franca for campaigners around the globe. Protesters wearing the iconic red cloak and white bonnet of Atwood’s handmaids – made material by designer Ane Crabtree for the hit 2017 TV series – have appeared at demonstrations in support of women’s bodily autonomy, from Northern Ireland to Argentina; and the phrase ‘ Nolite te bastardes carborundorum ’, which inspires Offred to fight back against Gilead, has become a feminist rallying cry.

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved by Toni Morrison is an enduring tale of the horrors of slavery, and of maternal love at any cost. Inspired by true events from history, the novel is the story of Sethe, a woman haunted by the spectre of an impossible decision she had to make in order to escape enslavement.

In 1988, Beloved received the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award. In her acceptance speech, Morrison reflected that ‘there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby’ to honour the memories of those subjected to slavery: ‘There’s no small bench by the road . . . And because such a place doesn’t exist (that I know of), the book had to . . . I think I was pleading for that wall or that bench or that tower or that tree when I wrote the final words.’ Responding to this plea, in 2008, the Toni Morrison Society set out to install benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America, starting on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina.

Morrison’s legacy doesn’t end with the impact of her own writing: working as editor at Random House, she used her position to champion the voices of Black writers including Angela Davis and Toni Cade Bambara , further transforming the modern literary canon.

Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett (1993)

The reason the rich are so rich, suggests Captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch Sam Vimes, is because they spend less money than the poor. For example, a person who can afford to shell out for a durable pair of boots, which may withstand a decade’s wear, will spend less over time than someone who can only afford a cheap pair that won’t last out the year. So goes the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness, as set out in Men at Arms from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.

This handy illustration of an economic theory has frequently been referenced in the past decade or so in connection to the increased cost of living, and most recently inspired food writer and anti-poverty activist Jack Monroe to launch the ‘Vimes Boots Index’ at the start of 2022. Monroe was prompted to develop this initiative after they noticed that the consumer price index to track inflation ‘grossly underestimates the real cost of inflation as it happens to people with the least’.

The Pratchett estate has supported the use of Vimes’s name for the index, with Rhianna Pratchett stating that ‘Vimes’s musing [is] all too pertinent today, where our most vulnerable so often bear the brunt of austerity measures and are cast adrift from protection and empathy. Whilst we don’t have Vimes any more, we do have Jack and Dad would be proud to see his work used in such a way.’

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo (2016)

The eponymous Kim Jiyoung of Cho Nam-Joo’s novel is an everywoman in a patriarchal society: as a child, she is second to her brother; as a student, she is the subject of unwanted attention from male teachers; as an employee, she is overlooked for promotion; as a wife, she must swap her career for domesticity. Shining a light on endemic sexism and institutional oppression in South Korea, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 has been celebrated as one of the most important feminist novels in Korean.

Shortly after the book’s publication, multiple cases of misogynistic hate crime and sexual violence galvanised a massive #MeToo movement in South Korea. With this, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 became a cultural touchstone for Korean feminists. Prosecutor Seo Ji-hyun, whose public disclosure of her experiences of workplace harassment made national headlines, quoted lines from the novel during the subsequent legal case.

Cho Nam-Joo’s novel has also lent its voice to the political sphere. In 2017, Democratic Party of Korea lawmaker Keum Tae-sub presented the book to 300 fellow National Assembly members for International Women’s Day on 8 March, a gesture echoed by the Justice Party’s Roh Hoe-chan, who presented the book to then President Moon Jae-in later the same year, with a note imploring him to ‘embrace all the Kim Jiyoungs born in 1982’. The Barun Party’s Kim Su-min even named an amendment to the gender equality law the ‘Kim Jiyoung Law’.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017)

Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is the story of Starr Carter, a sixteen-year-old girl fighting for justice following the murder of her best friend by a police officer. The YA novel, which has been adapted into a film starring Amandla Stenberg, is a powerful exploration of inequality, police violence and prejudice.

But Thomas doesn’t just see her novel as a response to activism: books are ‘a form of activism in their own right,’ she told the Observer , ‘in the fact that they do empower people and show others the lives of people who may not be like themselves.’

This is true for The Hate U Give , which has been an igniting spark for young activists in America and beyond. After a Texan school district banned the book from library shelves following a parental complaint, student Ny’Shira Lundy took inspiration from Starr to speak out. After gathering 4,000 signatures on a petition, Lundy was able to persuade the school district to return the book to circulation. In her accompanying letter to the superintendent, Lundy wrote, ‘Starr Carter has taught me that it is okay to be myself. That I should take charge and stand up for what I believe in.’

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Books that Changed the World: The 50 Most Influential Books in Human History

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  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Quercus Publishing (June 14, 2016)
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The week’s bestselling books, Feb. 11

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Hardcover fiction

1. House of Flame and Shadow by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury Publishing: $32) The third book in the action-packed Crescent City series.

2. North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random House: $28) A sweeping historical tale focused on a single house in the New England woods.

3. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (Riverhead: $28) The discovery of a skeleton in Pottstown, Pa., opens out to a story of integration and community.

4. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Knopf: $28) Lifelong BFFs collaborate on a wildly successful video game.

5. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (Knopf: $28) An orphaned son of Iranian immigrants embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret.

6. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (Ecco: $30) A giant Pacific octopus bonds with a widowed worker at a Washington state aquarium.

7. Come and Get It by Kiley Reid (Putnam: $29) A residential assistant gets messily involved with a professor and three unruly students.

8. Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros (Entangled: Red Tower Books: $30) In the sequel to the bestselling “Fourth Wing,” the dragon rider faces even greater tests.

9. Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros (Entangled: Red Tower Books: $30) A young woman reluctantly enters a brutal dragon-riding war college in this YA fantasy.

10. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper: $32) The story of a boy born into poverty to a teenage single mother in Appalachia.

Hardcover nonfiction

1. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin (Penguin: $32) The music producer’s guidance on how to be a creative person.

2. How to Know a Person by David Brooks (Random House: $30) The New York Times columnist explores the power of seeing and being seen.

3. Atomic Habits by James Clear (Avery: $27) The self-help expert’s guide to building good habits and breaking bad ones via tiny changes in behavior.

4. Prequel by Rachel Maddow (Crown: $32) The MSNBC anchor chronicles the fight against a pro-Nazi American group during World War II.

5. The Wager by David Grann (Doubleday: $30) The story of the shipwreck of an 18th century British warship and a mutiny among the survivors.

6. Oath and Honor by Liz Cheney (Little, Brown: $32) The former GOP representative recounts her fight to impeach and investigate Donald Trump.

7. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Knopf: $28) The true-crime tale of a genius art thief who kept all the spoils for himself.

8. Outlive by Peter Attia, Bill Gifford (Harmony: $32) A science-based self-help guide to living longer.

9. More Is More by Molly Baz (Clarkson Potter: $35) The popular cook on how to level up your skills in the kitchen.

10. A Hitch in Time by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve: $30) A selection of the late author’s reviews, diary entries and essays.

Paperback fiction

1. A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (Bloomsbury: $19)

2. Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead: $17)

3. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara (Anchor: $18)

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Kick Trump Off the Ballot? Even Liberal Justices Are Skeptical.

The supreme court heard arguments about whether donald trump can be ruled ineligible to run in colorado’s presidential primaries..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

We are following breaking news. The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that former President Donald Trump will be left off the state’s primary and presidential ballots.

In December, the Colorado Supreme Court issued a bombshell ruling —

This is a historic decision. It’s a momentous decision.

— that said Donald Trump was ineligible to be on the state’s ballot for the Republican presidential primary.

Because of his alleged role in the January 6 insurrection.

Because, it found, he had engaged in insurrection on January 6 —

It’s based on a little-known provision that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office.

— which according to the 14th Amendment disqualifies him from serving as president.

It states that anyone engaging in insurrection cannot hold public office.

But this is unprecedented constitutional territory, y’all.

This Civil War era constitutional provision could knock the leading candidate of one of the two major political parties off the ballot.

At the time, we turned to our colleague Adam Liptak who covers the Supreme Court for “The Times” to help us understand the meaning of that decision and what could happen next.

This really needs to be an issue that is resolved on a nationwide basis, meaning it has to go to the Supreme Court. And it would be shocking if the Supreme Court would not wade in and issue a ruling on this question that a decade ago would have been impossible to imagine.

Just as Adam predicted, the Supreme Court did take the case. And on Thursday, the justices heard arguments for and against keeping Trump off the ballot in Colorado.

Today, we turn to Adam once again to analyze those arguments and the responses from the justices, and what they reveal about how the high court is likely to rule in a case that could alter the course of this year’s race for president.

It’s Friday, February 9.

Adam, I really like your — what do the kids call it? Your fit.

I like your shirt. It’s a very handsome business casual kind of thing going on there.

It’s barely business, but it is casual.

OK. So Adam, the clock strikes 10:00 AM or so this morning, Thursday. And the Supreme Court begins to hear this momentous case. Take us into the room.

So this is the biggest election case since at least “Bush v. Gore,” the 2000 decision that handed the presidency to George W. Bush. And now the question is whether Donald Trump is eligible to be on the ballot in Colorado, but really all across the nation, under a provision of the Constitution that says if you’ve sworn an oath to support the Constitution and then engage in insurrection, you may not hold any office. The court had put the case on an exceptionally fast track, partly because ballots in Colorado are going out in a matter of days. Super Tuesday is almost upon us. And the nation needs an answer to whether the leading candidate of one of the political parties is even eligible to hold office.

And Colorado, of course, is one of the Super Tuesday states that’s going to be holding a Republican primary on March 5.

That’s right. So the courtroom, of course, just across the street from the Capitol, where on January 6, 2021 there was the cataclysmic assault on the seat of our government. And you might think that that would have occupied a substantial part of the argument.

Right, given what this case is about.

Right, that question of was it an insurrection? Did Donald Trump incite, engage in that insurrection? And although those topics were not wholly absent from the argument, they came up in passing a couple times. That really was not the focus of the argument. This was a legal argument about how the constitutional provision in this case works.

OK. Well, let’s then talk about the arguments made around that.

We’ll hear an argument this morning in case 23-719, “Trump versus Anderson.” Mr. Mitchell.

So there are two basic arguments in the case.

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court.

Jonathan Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer, stands up.

The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision is wrong and should be reversed for numerous independent reasons.

He starts off with his lead argument, which is a very close reading of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment that the Colorado Supreme Court used to say that Trump is not eligible to be president again.

The first reason is that President Trump is not covered by Section 3 because the president is not an officer of the United States as that term is used throughout the Constitution.

It probably helps, Michael, to parse through the words. And there are three different ideas embedded in the amendment. There’s first of all who does it apply to? And it says you have to have previously taken an oath as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state.

Officer of the United States refers only to appointed officials, and it does not encompass elected individuals such as the president or members of Congress.

And he argues that you can’t fit the president into the phrase “an officer of the United States,” that those are appointed, not elected officials. So that’s his first textual argument about who it applies to. Second textual argument, what offices does it apply to? And here I’m going to read a different part of the section.

It says, “No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of president and vice president, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States.” You’ll notice the president is not mentioned by name, although he would seem to hold an office civil or military. But there are arguments, again, that doesn’t apply. And then there’s the phrase “hold any office.” And Mitchell says —

Because even if the candidate is an admitted insurrectionist, Section 3 still allows the candidate to run for office and even win election to office.

You can’t hold an office, but it doesn’t say you can’t run for office. It doesn’t say you can’t be elected to office.

So if a state banned even an admitted insurrectionist from the ballot, it would be adding to and altering the Constitution’s qualifications for office. Because under Section 3 —

And he takes some additional comfort from the last clause of Section 3.

Section 3 cannot be used to exclude a presidential candidate from the ballot even if that candidate is disqualified from serving as president under Section 3. Because Congress can lift that disability after the candidate is elected, but before he takes office.

So he says even someone who is disqualified can run, can be elected. Because the moment before Inauguration Day, Congress can say by a 2/3 vote of each house that the person is eligible after all. So it’s not lawful to bar someone from the candidacy when at least in theory Congress can make you eligible right up to the point of inauguration.

And in this situation a ruling from this court that affirms the decision below would not only violate term limits, but take away the votes of potentially tens of millions of Americans. I welcome the court’s questions.

OK, so this admittedly is very technical, but there are three things going on here. First, Trump’s lawyer is saying that this doesn’t apply to presidents or former presidents because they’re not mentioned specifically in this rule. Secondly, he’s saying it doesn’t prevent anyone from seeking the office of the presidency because that office isn’t specifically mentioned in this rule. And finally, it doesn’t say anything about barring people from running for office. It only bars people from holding certain offices. So for all those reasons, Trump’s lawyer is saying this doesn’t apply to Trump and that the Colorado Supreme Court in its finding has been wrong.

That’s right.

Mr. Murray.

And Jason Murray, the lawyer for the six Colorado voters challenging Trump’s eligibility, says all of that is wrong.

He says Section 3 disqualifies all oath-breaking insurrectionists except a former president who never before held other state or federal office. There is no possible rationale for such an exemption.

That it would be an insane way to interpret the constitutional provision to exclude the most important office in the land and the highest executive official of the United States from a provision meant to safeguard democracy from insurrection.

Section 3 uses deliberately broad language to cover all positions of federal power requiring an oath to the Constitution.

He also makes the point that Section 3 is similar to other kinds of qualifications to be president.

States are allowed to safeguard their ballots by excluding those who are underage, foreign born —

You have to be 35 years old. You have to be a natural-born citizen of the United States.

He’s saying use your common sense, justices. This does apply to the president. That’s pretty clear.

— presidential elections. Under Article II and the 10th Amendment, states have the power to ensure that their citizens’ electoral votes are not wasted on a candidate who is constitutionally barred from holding office.

He says it’s a crazy way to run a system, that people can vote for Donald Trump and not know whether their vote is going to count depending on whether his current disqualification from running for office is perhaps lifted by Congress — and not only by Congress, by a 2/3 vote of each house, which is a little hard to imagine.

We are here because for the first time since the War of 1812, our nation’s capital came under violent assault. For the first time in history, the attack was incited by a sitting president of the United States to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power. I welcome the court’s questions.

And how did the justices, Adam, respond to these two clashing claims of this close reading of the 14th Amendment by a lawyer for Trump and a lawyer for the Colorado voters?

So at first, it seems like the justices are going to divide along predictable lines with conservative justices like Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito being open to this kind of close textual reading.

Mr. Mitchell, stepping back on this. A lot hinges on the difference between, in your argument, between the term “office” and “officer.”

And I guess I’m wondering what theory do you have, from an original understanding or a textualist perspective, why those two terms so closely related would carry such different weight.

And some of the liberals seemed skeptical of Trump’s lawyer’s argument.

Justice Kagan.

And if I could just understand —

Justice Kagan, for instance, throws up her hands, saying —

If they had thought about it, what reason would they have given for that rule? And it does seem as though there’s no particular reason. And you can think of lots of reasons for the contrary to say that the only people who have engaged in insurrection who are not disqualified from office are presidents who have not held high office before. Why would that rule exist?

Let’s be serious here. It can’t be that the president is not included in these catchall, all-encompassing phrases on something so important.

And is there any better reason for saying that an insurrectionist cannot hold the whole panoply of offices in the United States, but we’re perfectly fine with that insurrectionist being president?

I think that’s an even tougher argument for us to make.

Justice Sotomayor.

I just want to pin down your principal argument on Section 3.

And Justice Sonia Sotomayor, another liberal, makes the interesting point —

Your principal argument is that the president is not an officer of the United States, correct?

I would say it a little more forcefully than what Your Honor just described.

Bit of a gerrymandered rule, isn’t it, designed to benefit only your client?

— that this argument seems to be, as she put it, gerrymandered to favor Donald Trump.

I certainly wouldn’t call it gerrymandering. That implies nefarious intent.

You remember that list of offices we discussed.

Every other president falls into one of the named offices. Joe Biden was a senator. Bill Clinton was a governor. Donald Trump though didn’t serve in any previous official government capacity. He was a businessman, and then he became president.

Virtually every other president except Washington has taken an oath to support the Constitution, correct?

And with the possible exception of George Washington, every other president fits into one of those other slots. So we have an argument here that’s a ticket for one ride only, applies only to Donald Trump.

And Sotomayor’s point is that’s a little too cute by half that you’re coming up with an argument that applies to only one of our many presidents, or perhaps two, but the first one being the first when there really wasn’t much of a precedent to think about.

That’s right. That gives you a sense of how technical, historical, originalist that part of the argument was.

Justice Jackson.

Come back to whether the presidency is one of the barred offices.

And then in a little bit of a surprise, it turns out that not everyone is so predictable. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the third liberal, says it might actually make sense to her to exclude the presidency from Section 3.

I didn’t see any evidence that the presidency was top of mind for the framers when they were drafting Section 3 because they were actually dealing with a different issue. The pressing concern, at least as I see the historical record, was actually what was going on at lower levels of the government.

She says the people who adopted it were concerned with the possibility of insurrectionists infiltrating state government and that former Confederates would return to power in the South —

Either in local offices or as representatives.

— but not that the national office, the president elected by the entire nation, would conceivably be a former Confederate.

And that’s a very different lens. If your concern is trying to make sure that these people don’t come back through the state apparatus and control the government in that direction, seems to me very different than the worry that an insurrectionist will seize control of the entire national government through the presidency.

So suddenly, it looks like Justice Jackson is also perhaps an originalist, a textualist on this court.

Correct. And at her confirmation hearings, she held herself out to be an originalist. And many people, particularly on the right, scoffed. But she has, in her brief tenure on the court, occasionally shown strong originalist impulses.

And somewhat unexpectedly, that seems to be leading her to bolster an argument from Trump’s lawyer here on whether or not this amendment really does apply to Trump.

Specifically mentioned the presidency and the vice presidency.

But it wasn’t the final enactment.

It wasn’t the final — I’m sorry. It wasn’t the final enactment, but it does show that there was some concern by some people about Confederate insurrectionists ascending to the presidency. And we didn’t want to make a law office history-type argument.

So in listening to arguments on this first point, the main point pressed by Donald Trump’s lawyers, it seemed like there was the beginning of the possibility of a scrambled lineup. And as other issues were discussed in the case, that possibility seemed only to grow.

We’ll be right back.

So Adam, right before the break we covered the first issue in this hearing. And the justices’ responses were ideologically confusing, as you said. What happens with the second big issue in this hearing?

The second question is whether individual states are entitled to disqualify presidential candidates. And —

A state cannot exclude any candidate for federal office from the ballot on account of Section 3 —

Jonathan Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer, presses this point also.

— unless and until Congress enacts implementing legislation allowing it to do so.

And says Congress has to act. And we can’t have one state here and one state there disqualifying candidates.

— is that only Congress can provide the means of enforcing Section 3.

Well, what would such congressional action look like? What is he referring to?

You could imagine Congress enacting a law saying here’s what rights states do and don’t have in making these determinations, just setting some ground rules. But then —

President Trump’s other arguments for reversal ignore the constitutional role of the states.

Jason Murray, the lawyer for the Colorado voters, says that’s backwards.

States are allowed to safeguard their ballots by excluding those who are underage, foreign born, running for a third presidential term, or, as here, those who have engaged in insurrection against the Constitution in violation of their oath.

That the Constitution assigns states the substantial role of conducting federal elections. And this is part of that role.

It is kind of common knowledge — and we especially learned it in 2020 when President Trump tried to overturn the election results at the state level — that states very much are responsible for elections in this country, even federal elections, even the presidential election.

OK, so what do the justices think about both of these arguments being made about whether a state like Colorado can try to knock someone like Trump off the ballot?

The justices are very wary of giving this power in this context to individual states.

I mean, the whole point of the 14th Amendment was to restrict state power.

Chief Justice Roberts says the whole point of the 14th Amendment after all, adopted after the Civil War, adopted after states seceded from the Union, was to restrict state power to augment federal power.

So wouldn’t that be the last place that you’d look for authorization for the states, including Confederate states, to enforce the presidential election process?

He’s saying the 14th Amendment is at odds with the very idea of giving states such a power.

No, Your Honor. First, we would locate the state’s authority to run presidential elections not in the 14th Amendment, but in Article II.

So Jason Murray, the lawyer for the challengers, says that’s the wrong way to think about it, that states have authority to run presidential elections. It’s not located in the 14th Amendment. It’s located in Article II of the Constitution.

Article II gives states this broad power to determine how their electors are selected. And that broad power implies the narrower power to enforce federal constitutional qualifications.

And then Justice Alito —

Counsel, what do you do with what seem to me to be plain consequences of your position?

— picks up on another aspect of the question.

If Colorado’s position is upheld, surely there will be disqualification proceedings on the other side. And some of those will succeed.

Saying it could result in the Wild West of voting, where different states would not only use different standards to decide whether Donald Trump was on or off of their ballot, but perhaps knock President Biden off the ballot for supposed insurrectionary crimes of his own.

I would expect that a goodly number of states will say, whoever the Democratic candidate is, you’re off the ballot. And others for the Republican candidate, you’re off the ballot. And it’ll come down to just a handful of states that are going to decide the presidential election. That’s a pretty daunting consequence.

And having this kind of back and forth mayhem would be a recipe for disaster in a democracy.

Mr. Murray, you relied on the states’ extensive powers under the electors.

And then even Justice Kagan says, listen.

What’s a state doing deciding who gets to — who other citizens get to vote for for president?

The practical effect of allowing Colorado to bar Trump from the ballot affects voters in other states.

Colorado is not deciding who other states get to vote for for president. It’s deciding how to assign its own electors under its Article II power. And the Constitution grants them that broad power.

The effect of that is obvious, yes?

No, Your Honor. Because different states can have —

And what do we think Kagan’s specific fear is when she argues that letting Colorado take Trump off the ballot will affect other people’s voting? She seems to be saying outside of Colorado.

I guess it could mean one of two things or maybe more things. It could mean that it just affects the balance of power across the Electoral College and makes it less likely that the candidate, someone in Texas or in New Jersey who wants the support, is going to win because the Colorado votes drop out. It may also mean that if Colorado knocks Trump off the ballot, other states will feel persuaded that they should do the same thing.

That said, the lawyer for the voters, Jason Murray, doesn’t get it. He says Colorado is not deciding who states get to vote for for president. It’s deciding how to assign its own electors in the Electoral College.

And that’s just a function of state’s power to enforce, to preserve their own electors and avoid disenfranchisement of their own citizens.

What about the idea that we should think about democracy, think about the right of the people to elect candidates of their choice?

Justice Kavanaugh also raises his own concerns about disenfranchisement.

Does that come in when we think about should we read Section 3 this way or read it that way? What about the background principle, if you agree, of democracy?

I’d like to make three points on that, Justice Kavanaugh. The first is that constitutional safeguards are for the purpose of safeguarding our democracy, not just —

Jason Murray responds that Section 3 is designed to protect democracy.

This case illustrates the danger of refusing to apply Section 3 as written. Because the reason we’re here is that President Trump tried to disenfranchise 80 million Americans who voted against him. And the Constitution doesn’t require that he be given another chance.

So you had Murray trying very hard to convince them otherwise. But nonetheless, both Justice Kavanaugh, a conservative, and Justice Kagan, a liberal, seemed to be worried about the potential that a ruling that would knock Donald Trump off the ballot would amount to a kind of disenfranchisement.

And when we start to do the math here, it’s not just Justice Jackson anymore who is surprising us as a liberal justice skeptical of Colorado’s argument for keeping Trump off the ballot. We now have at least two of the liberal justices saying this might not hold up.

As the argument goes forward, it seems that there are probably eight justices prepared to keep Trump on the ballot and the only wild card. And it could end up being unanimous, but the only wild card is Justice Sotomayor.

Adam, if eight justices agree that Trump should be allowed to be on the ballot in Colorado, that would be kind of staggering given the nature of this case. It would also be kind of staggering given the nature of this court.

That’s right. And this is a court that has been battered, and questions have been raised about its legitimacy and authority and prestige. And I think the justices might view this as an opportunity to rebuild, to come together, to find consensus, and particularly in an issue where a contrary ruling, one that would knock a leading presidential candidate off the ballot, would give rise to a very tough reaction from half the country.

Adam, it’s possible, of course, that what you’re saying is right, that the justices have done a political analysis here and decided they want to be on the same page. And that page is to let voters have choice, keep Trump on the ballot. But is it also possible that at the end of the day what many people saw as a strong legal case being presented by the Colorado voters and their lawyer just turned out to be weaker once it got to the highest court in front of the nation’s preeminent jurists and started to crumble?

Most legal scholars think that the case against Donald Trump is very strong. The court for various reasons — good faith legal ones, political calculations, concerns about the consequences of a ruling — were always likely to be looking for an exit ramp. It looks like they’ve found one. And that exit ramp will be embraced by a substantial majority, maybe even all of the justices. But that doesn’t undermine the purely theoretical question of does Section 3 apply to Donald Trump’s conduct? It is a reflection of a judicial reality of a court that has been under some substantial stress, not wanting to use what political capital it has left on this particular cause.

Well, for those who see what Trump did on January 6 as disqualifying for the presidency, the Colorado effort to keep him off the ballot was very meaningful. And it was in many of their eyes justifiable. And if the Supreme Court rules that Trump can’t be held off the ballot, it will have eliminated a major route by which American voters can hold Trump accountable for trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election.

Yeah, I don’t want to undersell that point at all. If the court rules as I expect it to, it will be a stinging loss for opponents of Donald Trump who saw what happened on January 6, who consider it a vile insurrection that he incited, and in the face of a constitutional provision that it is child’s play to read as applying to him. All of that is true. But of course, this isn’t the only Trump case. Trump is the subject of numerous criminal prosecutions, including most notably a federal case arising from some of these same events. And that case will soon be at the Supreme Court, probably next week, in the form of a request from Donald Trump that he be deemed absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for his activities in trying to subvert the 2020 election.

And it would not surprise me at all, Michael, if these cases would be decided in tandem and in different ways with a ruling that Trump is eligible to run, but a ruling that he is not immune from prosecution, and sending the case back down for trial even as the election season heats up. And that would give the court the opportunity to look even-handed, to give Trump a significant victory and a significant loss, and leave it not only to the political process, but the ordinary criminal judicial process to decide whether Donald Trump can be held accountable for his January 6-related activities.

Well, Adam, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thank you, Michael.

Here’s what else you need to know today. The special counsel investigating President Biden’s handling of classified materials will not seek to prosecute him, but said there was evidence that Biden willfully retained and disclosed some sensitive material. In a report released on Thursday, the special counsel said that when Biden left the White House after his vice presidency in 2017, he took classified documents about Afghanistan and notebooks with handwritten entries that referred to sensitive intelligence. But in an unflattering assessment, the special counsel Robert Hur said that a jury would be unlikely to find Biden guilty of a crime because of his poor memory. Hur said that Biden could not remember key dates such as when his vice presidency ended and when his eldest son Beau had died.

Do you feel your memory has gotten worse, Mr. President?

My memory is fine.

During a news conference a few hours later, Biden angrily rejected the claim that his memory was in decline.

Take a look at what I’ve done since I’ve become president. None of you thought I could pass any of the things I got passed. How’d that happen? I guess I just forgot what was going on.

Today’s episode was produced by Rob Szypko, Lynsea Garrison, and Mary Wilson with help from Alexandra Leigh Young. It was edited by Paige Cowett and Brendan Klinkenberg. Contains original music by Marion Lozano and Corey Schreppel and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly. That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.

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In December, the Colorado Supreme Court issued a bombshell ruling that said Donald Trump was ineligible to be on the state’s ballot for the Republican presidential primary, saying he was disqualified under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution because he had engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6.

The Supreme Court has taken on the case and on Thursday, the justices heard arguments for and against keeping Trump on the ballot.

Adam Liptak, who covers the Supreme Court for The Times, analyzes the arguments, the justices’ responses, and what they can tell us about the likely ruling in a case that could alter the course of this year’s race for president.

On today’s episode

sunday times books that changed the world

Adam Liptak , who covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments.

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Background reading

What Happens Next in Trump’s Supreme Court Case on His Eligibility

A Ruling for Trump on Eligibility Could Doom His Bid for Immunity

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An earlier version of this episode misattributed one of the Supreme Court justices who was asking about the consequences if the Colorado ruling disqualifying Donald Trump from the ballot were to be upheld. It was Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., not Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

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Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002. More about Adam Liptak

Corey Schreppel leads the technical team that supports all Times audio shows, including “The Daily,” “Hard Fork,” “The Run-Up,” and “Modern Love.” More about Corey Schreppel

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Hottest January on record pushes 12-month global average temps over 1.5 degree threshold for first time ever

By Li Cohen, Haley Ott

February 8, 2024 / 7:05 AM EST / CBS News

The world just had its hottest year ever recorded, and 2024 has already set a new heat record for the warmest January ever observed, according to the European Union's climate change monitoring service Copernicus. 

The service said that January 2024 had a global average air temperature of 13.14 degrees Celsius, or 55.65 degrees Fahrenheit. That temperature was 0.70 degrees Celsius above the 1991 to 2020 average for the month and 0.12 degrees Celsius above the last warmest January, in 2020. 

It was also 1.66 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average for the month. 

pr-fig1-map-1month-anomaly-global-ea-2t-202401-1991-2020-v02-1.png

"2024 starts with another record-breaking month," Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, said in a news release announcing the findings. "Not only is it the warmest January on record but we have also just experienced a 12-month period of more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial reference period." 

The news from Copernicus comes just weeks after the agency confirmed that 2023 shattered global heat records . Those record temperatures were linked to deadly heat , droughts and wildfires that devastated countries around the world . The rise in global temperatures is  fuelling the extreme weather , helping feed storms that spawn hurricanes and bring massive precipitation events that flood developed areas . 

"This far exceeds anything that is acceptable," Bob Watson, a former chair of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change, told CBS News partner network BBC News.

"Look what's happened this year with only 1.5 degrees Celsius: We've seen floods, we've seen droughts, we've seen heatwaves and wildfires all over the world, and we're starting to see less agricultural productivity and some problems with water quality and quantity," Watson said.

A landmark U.N. report published in 2018 said the risks of extreme consequences of climate change would be much higher if global warming exceeded the 1.5-degree threshold. Most of the warming stems from the build-up of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere, largely emitted from the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil.

While the news is a dire warning about the state of the planet, scientists said it would take multiple years of surpassing the 1.5-degree mark for the world to officially be considered in the new era of climate change associated with the threshold. 

"This report does not mean that we will permanently exceed the 1.5C level specified in the Paris Agreement, which refers to long-term warming over many years," World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said last year. "However, WMO is sounding the alarm that we will breach the 1.5C level on a temporary basis with increasing frequency." 

In December, climate negotiators from around the world agreed at COP28 that countries must transition away from fossil fuels. The deal aims to usher in that transition in a manner that achieves net zero greenhouse gas emissions over the next 26 years, in part by calling for the expanded use of renewable energy. 

The plan, however, "includes cavernous loopholes that allow the United States and other fossil fuel producing countries to keep going on their expansion of fossil fuels," Center for Biological Diversity energy justice director Jean Su told The Associated Press in December . "That's a pretty deadly, fatal flaw in the text." 

Upon the news that January had marked yet another heat record, Burgess, with the EU's Copernicus service, reiterated the call for limiting the use of fossil fuels, saying it's essential to limit the rapid warming the world is experiencing.

"Rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are the only way to stop global temperatures increasing," she said. 

  • Climate Change
  • European Union
  • Oil and Gas
  • Clean Energy

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Li Cohen is a social media producer and trending content writer for CBS News.

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