Little books with a big impact (LBWABI)

Books that changed the world – perhaps. Certainly books that changed a great many people’s view of the world. The challenge here was is to find in our back catalog of 14,000 books, those that were both influential AND little, and bring them to Blaze to give away. Here’s our selection (so far):

‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The author was sentenced to 8 years in prison in Russia for critizing the Government. This is the story of one day in prison – a man and crust of bread – that blew the lid off the rot at the heart of the Soviet system in Russia, One might say that nothing has changed. At 180 pages this is definitely a LBWABI.

‘Hiroshima’ by John Hersey. Written as a magazine article one year after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Hersey tells the stories of six survivors. Up until that point in time people had been for (mostly for) and against the IDEA of an atomic bomb, but nobody had described what it did to real people. After Hersey, nobody could unsee or ignore the death and suffering it caused. At just over 200 pages this is a LBWABI.

‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad takes a journey deep into the heart of colonial Africa and asks, “Where are the monsters”. And the answer is , “It’s us. We are the monsters”. Easy for Conrad to criticize Belgium rather than his adopted Britain for the way they treated their colonies, but the 5 million killed in the Congo was even by the standards of the day, sickening. Chinua Achebe correcly took Conrad to task for his depiction of Africans and ‘primitive’ and wrote, ‘Things Fall Apart” that tells the story from the other side, and at around 220 pages is ten pages longer than HoD, both qualifying as LBWABI.