UnB 2019

    How can we ever change the world? Military
leaders have certainly managed to change large parts of it;
scientists devising cures and vaccines for disease can
spread a more benign influence across whole continents;
[5] the thoughts of religious leaders or philosophers can sweep
through generations like fire. But books?
    Reading books is generally a solitary pastime:
bookishness is the very antithesis of the man-of-action
qualities that seem to shake the world. The pen may boast
[10] of being mightier than the sword, but it is generally the
sword that wins in the short term. It is that phrase, though,
which gives the game away: in the short term, writers can
be imprisoned or executed, their work censored, and their
books burned, but over history, it is books and the ideas
[15] expressed within them that have transformed the world.
    But which books can be said to have changed the
world? There are few better ways of starting an argument
than producing a list, and I have no doubt that not
everyone will be happy about the books I included in my
[20] list. About some, like the Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio
and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, there can be little
argument - but what about Euclid’s Elements, Thomas
Paine’s Rights of Man or A Vindication of the Rights of
Women by Mary Wollstonecraft? The answer is that any
[25] list can only be subjective.

Andrew Taylor. Books that changed the world: the 50 most influential books in human history. Quercus Editions, 2014 (adapted).

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