| David Howorth | Davenport | - Bertrand Russell’s essays collected in Why I Am Not a Christian. It didn’t so much persuade me as it confirmed where I was headed on my own as a 14-year-old. Since I was growing up in the Bible Belt, that confirmation was important.
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| Jonathan Hoffman | Berkeley | - The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein, a terrifically well-researched narrative of the active participation of government, at ALL levels, with lenders and real estate developers, to block African-Americans from the greatest component of building personal and family wealth, the ownership of real estate. Its sorrowful conclusions establish the urgent necessity for reparations to Americans of color for the promises which, although they were inherent in our founding documents and in Reconstruction, were broken and retracted with impunity.
- Listen, Liberal, by Thomas Frank, a scholar who has figured out why liberals snatch defeat from victory repeatedly in national elections: the liberals who control the Democratic Party really don’t care about the economic issues that plague the working poor and middle class. Increasingly better-educated and well off (does this sound familiar, fellow Yalies?), they–we–would rather bask in our relative financial security than equalize the playing field for the many who struggle to make it for themselves and their children. Frank calls for a renewed commitment to the inspiring policies of the FDR era.
- The Book of Isaiah.
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| Wayne Willis | Jonathan Edwards | - Journey to the East by Herman Hesse was such a book for me. Basically, it was my first profound experience with “believing is seeing.”
- Also, The Singularity In Near, by Ray Kurzweil, about the coming merger of humans into and with their AIs. Mind blowing.
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| Matt Flynn | Ezra Stiles | - Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche. I had had a classical education (Latin, Greek etc.) like Nietzsche. But his ideas and prose were hyper-modern. His style-influenced me a great deal. His prose is really a prose poem-magnificent. His actual poetry was poor.
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| Bruce Bolnick | Trumbull | - As mundane as it may seem, my freshman year exposure to Economics by Paul Samuelson was a life-changer. When I arrived at Yale I was a Goldwater libertarian: the government should just leave us alone. Both my world view and my career path were fundamentally altered when I learned not only about the magic of the marketplace, but also about market failures, sources of inequality, and how mathematics could be applied to policy analysis.
- In 1967, Tally’s Corner by Elliot Liebow (subtitle: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men) revealed to me the plight and the humanity of the black underclass in America.
- In high school I read The Blue Nile by Alan Morehead, which triggered a deep fascination with Africa — to the extent that I opted for a local-salary position at the University of Nairobi as my first job after completing my Ph.D. at Yale. That was a life-changer!
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| Charles Carignan | Berkeley | - My parents owned The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley (1945). As plants that reappear every spring spontaneously are called “perennials”, Huxley finds common themes running through all times and places in the relationship between humans and the Divine. The book uses quotations from texts including St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Christ, Chuang Tzu, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, William Law, Rumi, Shankara, the Upanishads and many others. See a key quotation and more detail in the Comments section below. Fifty-plus years on, still studying those works!
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| Paul McAuliffe | Branford | - How Good People Make Tough Choices by Rushworth Kidder makes the realm of ethics and morality understandable, if still complex. Its guidance and insights helped shape much of my subsequent life and career. Although now a bit dated, I recommend for anyone searching for clarity on how to approach life’s tough dilemmas.
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| Jeff Horton | Ezra Stiles | - My most recent game changer book is Stamped From the Beginning: A Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X Kendi. This magisterial book recounts the impact of racist policies and thought throughout our history. It opened my eyes to the racism in every aspect of our history, from Cotton Mather to DJT. I realized that racist practices and beliefs are part of the foundation of the US. I may have kind of thought that before, since I am a lifelong progressive with a close personal and political connection to Black people, but Prof Kendi supplied the details that demonstrate beyond a doubt that racist thought is woven into our national identity.
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| Donald Lewis | Davenport | - I read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn in freshman year, and it has continued to influence my rational and spiritual life then and now. Made me realize the common metaphorical nature of both philosophy/religion and science – giving me new respect for both ways of understanding the world. It gave me a method and criteria for continuing to expand my own experience and belief of beauty, truth, and thus morality.
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| Fred Morris | Jonathan Edwards | - Karen Armstrong’s A History of God is a deeply researched, expansive history of the concept of God. I’ve read it twice. Putting “God” into historical context over the past several thousand years answered a lot of questions. It gave me an important context for deciding what I believe and don’t believe about God.
- Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction has rocked me like no other book I’ve read. The loss of species in the past several decades is frightening. I am genuinely scared for the future of my children and their children. “The Sixth Extinction” should have set off the same alarm bells as Silent Spring. That it hasn’t is depressing.
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| Harry Forsdick | Pierson | - Gödel, Escher, Bach, by Douglas Hofstadter, has had a profound impact on the way I think. Hofstader describes how fundamental ideas in human understanding are derived from works of Mathematics, Art, and Music. I find that when I think about such works, I understand the principle in one domain and then see that same principle in many other domains.
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| John O’Leary | Silliman | - The End of Faith (2005) by Sam Harris is a devastating critique of the belief systems of the major religions—and especially the literal readings of their sacred books. But because Sam is a psychedelic veteran and decades-long meditator he’s nevertheless open to spiritual experience that makes his so-called “atheism” all the more intriguing to me. His book enabled me to leave behind the dogmas of Christianity and start over.
- This brought me to Stephen Mitchell’s The Gospel According to Jesus (1994), a fresh reading of the life of Jesus—following in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson (and even Leo Tolstoy) who took a skeptical view of much of the New Testament. This has allowed me to reimagine Jesus in the context of a wisdom tradition that includes Lao Tzu and the Buddha and to draw my own conclusions about this remarkable man, independent of religious institutions.
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| Mark Curchack | Davenport | - The Sellout by Paul Beatty. Profound and comical, almost magical realist novel set in East LA. Strong commentary on race, jaw dropping to read.
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| Djelal Kadir | Ezra Stiles | - Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude – The work that gave rise to what would be called “magical realism” in literature. A marvelous allegory of Latin America’s history that has proved more historically accurate than official historiography. Reading this novel’s first edition in 1967 led me to add Latin American Studies to my philosophy major.
- Margeurite Yourcenar, The Memoirs of Hadrian – An illuminating epistle from one Roman Emperor (Hadrian) to his successor (Marcus Aurelius) as novelized by one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. Stoicism as a philosophy of succession when the downturn of the imperial curve is apparent was formatively revealing to me about empires and the vicissitudes of imperial power when viewed honestly. The book proves even more significant in a time of a pandemic—Marcus Aurelius Meditations, a work of daily philosophical reflections during a time of a viral plague that had its concomitant in what the Emperor himself called “political pestilence” makes this a very timely book, yet again.
- And more recently, Dominic Smith, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos – A recent novel based on the Dutch Golden Age that proves most enlightening on the politics of culture and on the perennial arts of authenticity, counterfeit, legacy, and the interchangeability of the real and the fake. A very timely book, as it turns out
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| Mike Baum | Timothy Dwight | - Two books contributed to my journey to Christianity and ultimately to the Orthodox Church. The first, C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, impressed me by its logical approach to reading the Gospels and how a prominent intellectual (whom I first encountered as an English major in a whole different context) came, almost in spite of himself, to belief.
- The second, many years later, Fr Peter Gillquist’s Becoming Orthodox – his personal account of how an evangelical Christian (and considerable scholar himself) came to belief, membership, and the priesthood in the “Eastern” Orthodox church. Unlike Lewis, Fr Peter became a personal acquaintance, and the same quiet logic and historical context evident in his writing flowed from his demeanor and life.
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| Nicholas Hawkin | Trumbull | - The Magus by John Fowles. I relate to it because Nicholas Urfe, the protagonist, became an English teacher abroad when he couldn’t think of anything else to do – just like me. It’s essentially a lesson in learning to love and this is one of the most important lessons one can learn.
- The World Over: The Collected Stories by William Somerset Maugham. A 2-volume set that includes all of the 91 stories Maugham wished to see preserved. Outstanding, with debts to Chekhov and de Maupassant.
- Voices of the Old Sea by Normal Lewis. Three successive summers on the Spanish Costa Brava just before the tourist hordes invaded and changed everything. Written with panache and wit, this is a perceptive personal experience.
- See All My Quake Books for a few more!
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| Ken Brown | Branford | - 1493 by Charles Mann. The book is about how Columbus’s “discovery” of America changed world history with an emphasis on Latin America, China, and Europe. My education, as I assume for most of our classmates, concentrated on North America for this period. This book really opened my eyes.
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| Nathan Gans | Jonathan Edwards | - When I was about 14, I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. Besides terrifying me, it jolted me out of out the sheltered, comforting childhood that my parents had provided. Even though there were members of our synagogue who had “come over” from Germany in the 1930s, I was largely unaware of the Holocaust. More generally, the book emphasized to me the cruelty and depravity inherent in our species.
- About 20 years ago, I read Consilience, by E.O. Wilson and Guns Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Excited by these books, I undertook a belated, informal, and delightful scientific education. It made my own work, which had nothing to do with science, more interesting and helped me improve my performance. Both these books have understandably been criticized as reductive and deterministic, but their scope is daring.
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| Doug Leonard | Timothy Dwight | - The Bible – What and who not to believe in.
- A Critique of Pure Reason (Immanuel Kant) – The limits of knowledge and philosophy.
- Shakespeare – What it means to be a man in this world.
- Eugene O’Neill and Aeschylus – The reach of hubris.
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| Tom Weber | Pierson | - The question makes me realize that shifts, especially major shifts, in my thinking occurred as a result of my life experiences–not of anything I read. Certainly not of a single book. I was going to cite Atlas Shrugged, which I read at age 36 and which definitively turned me from a socialist into a classical liberal, free-market capitalist, but really only because it aligned with my experience (in government, business, academia and socialist countries). I do have a list of books that impressed me deeply but not of books that changed me in any important way. Call me thickheaded if you must. It’d be nicer to say I’m a life learner.
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The authors acknowledge that most “quake” experiences occur when you are young … that mental models settle in thereafter and are less frequently challenged … or at least less succesfully challenged. That said, later-in-life epiphanies do occur. So let’s share the Big Books (or other “works”) that shook you — at any point in your life.
Here is a test comment to show format: Journey to the East by Herman Hesse was such a book for me. Basically, it was my first profound experience with “believing is seeing.” Prior to then, my scientific materialism and “objective” reality was all I knew.
My parents owned an early edition of “The Perennial Philosophy” by Aldous Huxley published in 1945. As plants that reappear every spring spontaneously are called “perennials”, Huxley finds common themes running through all times and places in the relationship between humans and the Divine.
The book uses quotations from texts including St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Christ, Chuang Tzu, Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, William Law, Rumi, Shankara, the Upanishads and many others. From the introduction:
“The metaphysic that recognises a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being — the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions. A version of this Highest Common Factor in all preceding and subsequent theologies was first committed to writing more than twenty-five centuries ago, and since that time the inexhaustible theme has been treated again and again, from the standpoint of every religious tradition and in all the principal languages of Asia and Europe.”
Huxley writes:
“If one is not oneself a sage or saint, the best thing one can do, in the field of metaphysics, is to study the works of those who were, and who, because they had modified their merely human mode of being, were capable of a more than merely human kind and amount of knowledge.”
Fifty-plus years on, still studying those works!