Books That Made a Difference to Me

I’m not a regular reader of O: The Oprah Magazine, but when I come across one, I turn to the “reading room” segment. In each issue, they have a celebrity, author or other notable person comment on a few books that they find notable. I enjoy reading and I’m curious about what other people enjoy reading, even if I don’t share their tastes. What follows are books that made a difference to me roughly in the style of the O feature.

The Holy Bible

As a believer in Christ, this book is a touchstone for me. The Bible is one of the ways God reveals himself, and it is the most explicit, specific, definitive and accessible special revelation. Jesus compared the word of God to a mirror, and said those who didn’t do it were like someone walking away from a mirror and forgetting what they looked like. Within its pages, the metaphor of a sword is applied to God’s word. One the great uses of this sword is to, in indelicate terms, cut through the crap.

Simple Pictures are Best
By Nancy Willard
Illustrations by Tomie De Paola

This is a children’s book and I first read it as a boy. It has so influenced me that I sometimes use the phrase “simple pictures are best” in conversation. The moral of this parable is to keep it simple, don’t create unnecessary complications. I’m not immune to mission creep and function overload. However, this book helped me develop an early appreciation for focus, setting priorities and enjoying those things that do one thing very well.

Spider-Man Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko

I could carry on for some time about all that is great about Spider-Man. The essence of it is this: the core of Peter Parker and his story is ethics. Behind the mask, he is just a man and he is just as concerned with his family, friends and job as with battling supervillains. Like us, Peter faces the costly rewards of doing what is right and the painful price of choosing what is wrong in a complex world he doesn’t fully understand. What makes him a hero isn’t his power, it is his character.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race By Edwin Black

The atrocities of the Nazis were justified, in their minds, as a science-based policy for managing society. The science was eugenics; it originated in American. I was amazed that not only did it start here, but also one of its largest proponents and popularizers worked in my home state, Missouri. Black thoroughly traces eugenics from it roots in an America, both as a science and a policy, to its leap to other nations, its ultimate expression as policy in Nazi Germany and its aftermath, which continues to linger in science and politics. Today, calls for science-based policy are often in the news, but it is important that both policy and science be informed by ethics. (Edwin Black also wrote IBM and the Holocaust.)

The Road to Serfdom
By F. A. Hayek

Hayek devoted this book “to socialists of all parties.” His particular audience was the British intelligentsia (Hayek was an economics professor at the University of London and familiar with German intellectual life from his years in his native Austria). His message was a warning: socialism leads to totalitarianism. Socialism was a popular movement in the time Hayek wrote this book (first published in 1944). Even the United States looked to the communist, fascist and national socialist governments of the world as models to emulate (until we entered World War II and many of these governments became our enemies). Today, socialist ideas and policies are widely espoused, though few would put the socialist label on them, and their proponents seem to imagine, some may be convinced and some may pretend, that a planned society can still be a free one. Hayek demonstrates that socialist government and individual freedom cannot coexist for long.