Airdate: Jennifer Byrne presents Books that Changed the World
Next week Jennifer Byrne looks at the books that have impacted the world over. Any predictions?
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Next week Jennifer Byrne looks at the books that have impacted the world over.
Four guests join her for a discussion on this very select group of titles in “Books that Changed the World”.
Any predictions on what might make the cut? Guessing it won’t be “Molvanîa (A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry).”
Jennifer Byrne is looking at a unique category of books – books so powerful and so persuasive that they actually changed the fabric of our world.
These are books that seeded ideas, fired debate and often provoked fierce resistance. They are books which could not be ignored, and their influence remains with us today.
Four guest panellists, from four very different backgrounds, join Jennifer to discuss the books they see as landmarks in their various fields.
Danielle Clode began her career in politics and psychology, before receiving a Rhodes Scholarship and switching to zoology to complete her doctorate. Science and natural history are her big subjects now and the latest of her six books is A Future In Flames.
Mark Carnegie grew up wanting to be a marine biologist but became a venture capitalist instead. He has spent the last 25 years as investor and corporate adviser in New York, London, and Sydney, and really annoyed some of his fellow bizoids last year by arguing the rich should pay more tax.
Geoff Dyer is a critically acclaimed journalist, essayist and author who has been described as ‘possibly the best living writer in Britain’. He’s an Oxford graduate but claims his ‘quality of study was much higher’ while living on the dole in Brixton in the early eighties.
Christine Wallace is one of Australia’s leading political journalists, publisher of a daily blog Breakfast Politics and a notable biographer of, among others, John Hewson and Germaine Greer.
 Jennifer Byrne presents  ABC1 Tuesday 26 June @ 10.15pm
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5 Responses
I predict that none of the books listed used the ‘word’ impacted.
Excellent list @Secret Squirrel! I would also concur on The Bible. And to the fiction list, I’d add American Psycho, Animal Farm, To Kill a Mocking Bird and Wuthering Heights.
Some candidates that come to mind, none of which are novels:
Principia Mathematica – Isaac Newton
On the origin of Species – Charles Darwin
The Republic (& others) – Plato
The Communist Manifesto / Das Kapital – Karl Marx
Mein Kampf – Adolf Hitler
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (“little red book”)
The Art of War – Sun Tzu
A Vindication of the Rights of Women – Mary Wollstonecraft (predates The Female Eunuch by nearly 200 years)
Novels are a bit harder to pick as it’s sometimes difficult to decide whether they informed a generation or merely reported on where they were already going. Maybe:
1984 – George Orwell
War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells
Sons and Lovers & Lady Chatterly’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence
The Kama Sutra
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
Prob chuck in The Collected Works of William Shakespeare since just about any proverb or glib saying that isn’t from the bible comes from one of his plays. I’m sure there are quite a few I haven’t thought of.
Darwin’s Origin of The Species.
And seeing that one of the guests is Germaine Greer’s biographer, The Female Eunuch is a good bet.
Well I’m guessing they avoid religious books because those are a shoe-in for this category. The Bible…duh…Scientology, Mormons etc. plenty of world changing books there.