books that have changed you

Have you ever read a book that changed you (i.e. changed your position on an issue, changed your diet, got you to switch from Frito's to Doritos, etc.)?

No Bad Dogs by Barbara Woodhouse gave me an entirely new perspective on communicating with my dog way back in the 1980s. Up until I read her book I was going about the house-breaking thing all wrong!

Yes, there is one book which changed my life dramatically, Robert Kennedy and his times. The following is taken verbatim from a myspace blog I did at the death of Arthur Schlesinger when he died in March.

...The book that made me a liberal in the fifth grade was his "Robert Kennedy and his Times", a two-volume, 1,066 page book on, well, Robert Kennedy (you know, President Kennedy's brother, US Attorney General, assassinated in 1968 while running for President). I was very impressed by Kennedy's support for civil rights during the 50's and 60's, his opposition to putting ground troops into Vietnam, and his ideas for aggressive social change in the US. I do not hold a rosy view of John Kennedy's presidency that many older liberals have, but Robert was different from his brother in many ways.

I read the book in the fifth grade; at 1,066 pages, it took a while. The nuns at my school were concerned about me reading such a book at recess instead of playing with the others. My thought was, I don't play well with others anyways, so let me read my book! That book made me socially aware of things I had never really thought about, and who does, in elementary school? Just precocious children such as myself. I began questioning everything, and by high-school, I was firmly ensconced in democratic liberalism, which has evolved today into a very humanistic liberalism...

In the early 1990s I read Sister Helen Prejean's book Dead Man Walking. Prior to reading this book I thought Capital Punishment was a necessary job required to maintain some order in the world. After reading Sister Helen's conviction and hearing her speak in a lecture at Southeastern Louisiana University my thoughts on the issue evolved.

I don't know if it changed me all that much since I was already anti-war, but Johnny Got His Gun really got to me and made me more so. I never thought much about it until the day I put my 20 year old son on a bus in 1990 and didn't know if I'd ever see him again. He came back without having to go into harm's way, but then I read that book.

A book that changed how I thought about history is A Pillar of Iron by Taylor Caldwell. It is a work of fiction, but the research she put into it was amazing and accurate. I suppose it didn't really change my outlook, but highlighted and brought out my love of history in general, and why we as human are where we are on the planet. It is btw the story of Marcus Tullius Cicero, one of the most fascinating men in history.

Also, Lolita changed the way I thought about reading. Nabokov is the most interesting writer, and was a genius as far as prose and twistiness of plot. He wrote the ulitmate 'unreliable narrator' and opened my mind to much more interesting fiction.