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  • Books inspire us.

  • They teach us.

  • They let us escape into new worlds.

  • But some books do much more than this.

  • These books hit a collective nerve,

  • and have had a profound and lasting effect on society.

  • What are the titles that had this impact?

  • There are many, many books that fit this definition,

  • but we've managed to narrow it down to five books

  • that have truly shaped our world.

  • ...wrote Robert Burton in his enormous 900 page book,

  • The Anatomy of Melancholy.

  • Which was first published way back in 1621.

  • So in the 17th Century,

  • there weren't books about melancholy,

  • or as we would call it today, depression.

  • It looks as if Robert Burton himself suffered from depression.

  • And there's a real sense

  • as he writes it, that he's writing himself into a position

  • of expertise about depression, so he can help himself

  • as well as other people.

  • And it's remained such a kind of influential book

  • over the centuries since then.

  • Not simply because of its subject matter,

  • it's the way it's written - it explores inner life

  • in a way that hadn't really been explored before.

  • So it's the patient's voice.

  • And one of the things that we've learnt over the last 20 years

  • is the importance of the patient's voice,

  • in targeting research and clinical treatment.

  • To 1960s America now,

  • where many people still thought that a woman's place was in the home.

  • Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963,

  • and in the introduction describes it as,

  • "The problem that has no name."

  • It was a book writing about the experience and aspirations

  • of women in suburban America.

  • It stood out as a book at this time because the experience of women

  • wasn't being written about in this way for the general population.

  • It stood out because she was standing up and saying,

  • "We need to acknowledge that there is more to life for these women

  • than being the perfect wife, the perfect mother."

  • She developed the idea that women needed to become politicised,

  • they needed to think about their experience at home.

  • However, and there is a big however,

  • the biggest criticism came from her exclusion of women of colour.

  • Poor women's experience was excluded, she also excluded lesbians.

  • Despite these shortcomings,

  • this book had real impact at the time.

  • It bought feminism to a very wide audience and that's a huge positive.

  • Bill McKibben's 1989 book, The End of Nature,

  • is considered to be the first book to bring global warming

  • to a general audience.

  • The End of Nature is about how humans are changing the planet.

  • It's a sad lament on human destruction.

  • In the 1980s, people had been talking about global warming,

  • but it hadn't entered the public consciousness as something

  • that we should be really concerned about,

  • and we should be already acting on.

  • What he did with this book is really wake people up

  • to this dramatic change that we are having globally on the natural world.

  • And which now is taken for granted by everybody,

  • we all are very aware of the impact we're having.

  • And it's largely due to books like this.

  • Things Fall Apart by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe,

  • was one of the first African novels in English

  • to gain global recognition and acclaim,

  • and it is still read and studied all over the world to this day.

  • Africa was always seen through the eyes of the white colonials.

  • It was like a door opening

  • into a world that white Europeans never understood

  • and even as it was published

  • people were astonished by the beauty of the book.

  • Here comes a man who's talking about Igbo villages in Nigeria

  • and their lives and their inner thoughts

  • and their hopes and desires and we'd never seen that.

  • And for Africans - and that's the more important point -

  • there were emerging writers,

  • they knew their time was now,

  • they knew that the world was ready

  • and it was that book that convinced them that it was.

  • And finally, to post-war Britain,

  • a time when many items were still rationed,

  • and to Elizabeth David's A Book of Mediterranean Food.

  • Britain already had a reputation for poor food,

  • plain food, grey food.

  • She wrote it as a memoir almost, of her time spent in southern Europe

  • before and during World War Two.

  • She wrote it really as a yearning for these wonderful places

  • and the colours and the scents and the flavours.

  • These days we completely take for granted ingredients like chickpeas,

  • lemon, garlic, olive oil, tomatoes, basil.

  • But then, when this book was published,

  • none of those ingredients were really available.

  • I mean, if you wanted to buy olive oil,

  • you had to go to a chemist's shop

  • because it was sold for treating earache.

  • She triggered a movement which we still feel today

  • which is one where food becomes something important

  • not just to our daily routine of nourishing ourselves

  • but saying a little bit more about who we are.

  • So there's now multiple generations

  • of food writers and cookery presenters

  • whose existence now would not have been possible without that book.

  • Words on a page can do so much more than entertain.

  • Some books have imagined, explored and introduced ideas

  • which have had a lasting impact on our society

  • which we experience to this day, even if we haven't read them.

Books inspire us.

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