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March 20, 2006
Books that Changed the World
Stranger Fruit leads us to a piece in Sunday's Times Online by the British critic and novelist Melvyn Bragg entitled "The world's best books." Braggs says,
. . . I wanted books that I could prove had changed, rootedly, the lives of people all over the land.
The land in this case is Great Britain and all of his candidates are in English by English authors. In its own way, that includes The King James Bible. Here is Bragg's list, which he calls "twelve books that changed the world."
- Principia Mathematica (1687) by Isaac Newton
- Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes
- Magna Carta (1215) by members of the English ruling classes
- Book of Rules of Association Football (1863) by a group of former English public-school men
- On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin
- On the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1789) by William Wilberforce in Parliament, immediately printed in several versions
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft
- Experimental Researches in Electricity (three volumes, 1839, 1844, 1855) by Michael Faraday
- Patent Specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine (1769) by Richard Arkwright
- The King James Bible (1611) by William Tyndale and 54 scholars appointed by the king
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith
- The First Folio (1623) by William Shakespeare
I have read all or major portions of the ones in red. I've also read a little of Faraday's epic work.
If one cast a little broader, I would add the Koran, the Bagaivad Gita, Confucius' Analects, Plato's Republic, Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and Galileo' Sidereus Nuncius, the Vulgate and The United States Constitution. If the Wright Brothers had filed a patent on wing warp, I might add that to my list. Marconi and Tesla's basic radio patents would also make my list as well as Edison's patent on the telephone. I think they have changed as many lives as Arkwright's spinning machine. But once you start down the patent road, there are so many things one could mention. Except for the Patent Specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine, I'm not sure what I would take off the list because all the ones I have read I would leave on. Married Love seems like it might be a candidate for removal but don't tell Shirley.
To most Americans having the Book of Rules of Association Football on the list may seem trivial but Bragg makes an interesting case for it,
The first Book of Rules of Association Football (1863) enabled the world to play a game which now commands a unique and previously uncharted, unimagined empire of followers, participants, fanatics and rich merchants.
Of course, much the same can be said for the Book of Mormon.
Posted by Duane Smith at March 20, 2006 4:01 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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