100 Books that Changed the World

Scott Christianson, Ph.D. is a prize-winning author. His books include 100 Diagrams That Changed the World, With Liberty for Some: 500 Years of Imprisonment in America; Condemned: Inside the Sing Sing Death House; Notorious Prisons: Inside the World's Most Feared Institutions; Bodies of Evidence: Forensics and Crime; Freeing Charles: The Epic Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, Village Voice, and Newsday.Colin Salter is a prolific author of literary history. For Batsford he has written 100 Books that Changed the World, 100 Letters that Changed the World and 100 Speeches that Changed the World. He is the author of a biography of Mark Twain and a history of the books in one family’s three-hundred-year-old library. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, dog and bicycle.

'An attractive, accessible testimony to the power of the written word'

• Introduction 10I Ching 14The Epic of Gilgamesh 16Torah 18The Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer 20Aesop’s Fables 22The Art of War, Sun Tzu 24The Analects of Confucius 26Kama Sutra, Vatsyayana 28The Republic, Plato 30Elements of Geometry, Euclid 32De Architectura, Vitruvius 34Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder 36The Quran 38Arabian Knights 40The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu 42The Divine Comedy, Dante 44The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer 46Gutenberg Bible 48The Prince, Machiavelli 50On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Nicolaus Copernicus 52Lives of the Artists, Vasari 54The Prophecies, Nostradamus 56Don Quixote, Cervantes 58King James Bible 60Shakespeare’s First Folio 62Micrographia, Robert Hooke 64Paradise Lost, John Milton 66Samuel Pepys’s Diary 68Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton 70Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift 72Species Plantarum, Carl Linnaeus 74Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary 76The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole 78The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon 80The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith 82Rights of Man, Thomas Paine 84A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft 86Grimm’s Fairy Tales 88Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen 90Frankenstein, Mary Shelley 92Procedure for Writing Words, Music and Plainsong in dots, Louis Braille 94Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers 96The Pencil of Nature, William Henry Fox Talbot 98Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 100Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë 102David Copperfield, Charles Dickens 104Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 106Roget’s Thesaurus 108Walden, Henry David Thoreau 110Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert 112Gray’s Anatomy 114On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin 116Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management 118Les Miserables, Victor Hugo 120Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne 112Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll 124Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky 126Das Kapital, Karl Marx 128War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 130The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain 132The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde 134The Time Machine, H.G. Wells 136The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud 138Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust 140The Origin of Continents and Oceans, Alfred Wegener 142Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Albert Einstein 144Ulysses, James Joyce 146The Trial, Franz Kafka 148The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Walter Y. Evans-Wentz 150Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence 152All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque 154The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes 156How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie 158Dr Spock’s Baby and Child Care 160The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank 162Kinsey Reports 1641984, George Orwell 166The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir 168A Book of Mediterranean Food, Elizabeth David 170The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley 172Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov 174The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien 176On the Road, Jack Kerouac 178The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss 180Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe 182To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee 184Silent Spring, Rachel Carson 186One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn 188The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan 190Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung 192One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 194I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou 196Ways of Seeing, John Berger 198Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig 200A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking 202The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie 204Maus, Art Spiegelman 206Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling 208Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty 210This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein 212Acknowledgements 215Index 219