While New Yorkers are nominating their favorite libraries for the NYC Neighborhood Library Awards, we've been asking guests and listeners, "What book changed your mind?" Here are some books that changed Brian's and a few of his guests' minds.
Brian Lehrer: The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria.
“I remember that it changed my mind about what to look for in democracy movements around the world. I used to look only or primarily at whether they had free and fair elections, but [it] convinced me to use a more robust measure of whether ppl are empowered with items including an independent judiciary, separate branches of government, checks and balances… and how well each so-called democracy guarantees the rights of political minorities, the groups people in any country who lose elections."
Julie Sandorf, president of the Charles H. Revson Foundation: Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by J. Anthony Lukas
"Common Ground by Anthony Lukas, the 1986 Pulitzer Prize Winner, about the busing crisis in Boston, sent me on a 30-year exploration of race in America. It led me to Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63 by Taylor Branch, Beloved by Toni Morrison, The Known World by Edward Jones, and then Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an extraordinary look at race in America through the eyes of a Nigerian woman … and lastly is Keith Richards' Life which changed my mind about what modern music is and who were the inventors of modern rock and roll which is very much tied up with race in America."
Stelios Vasilakis, director of programs and strategic initiatives at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation: 2666: A Novel by Roberto Bolaño.
"A trilogy that made me think very carefully about putting a face to the hundreds of women that had disappeared in northern Mexico as part of the cartel murders."
Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist and The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 by Alan Taylor.
"These are new ways of looking at what we thought we already knew. We’re on the cusp of a new way of understanding ourselves."
Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap: Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England by Alan MacFarlane
"I'd been reading a lot about the attacks on powerful women in this period, and expected to find that the trials were aimed at silencing or disciplining women who challenged male control. That book truly only changed my mind, and even better, drove home the need to look more closely and even compassionately at the anxieties produced by social change and the different ways people try to reconcile their ideals with behavior that in some ways violates those ideals."
Jacqueline Woodson names Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran which "completely changed my mind about so many things," and "of course, James Baldwin's Another Country."
Azar Nafisi also cited James Baldwin, for Go Tell It On The Mountain: "I think he brought a new perspective it should be another great American novel" She sees that novel as one of the progenies of Huck Finn, another is Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye.
Cris Beam, too, cites Baldwin for his essays Notes of a Native Son "talking about his family and connecting it to larger issues."
Andrew Solomon says "Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room is the best book on parenting there's ever been, all about the pain and joy of being a mother."
Interested in what books changed the minds of The Brian Lehrer Show listeners? We're also compiling an ongoing listener list of books.