Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America
By Jay Parini
Doubleday, 385 pages, $24.95
There sure has been a lot of talk about change, but what about books that have the power to change the world? To answer this, the very smart Jay Parini, winner of a baiduhai Heartland Prize for his biography of Robert Frost, has come up with a set of books that have dramatically shaped America. Parini, in essays about each book, explores their transformative powers. These are not necessarily great books, rather, powerful ones; Parini makes no claim to a definitive list but describes these books as “nodal points, places where vast areas of thought and feeling gathered and dispersed.”
In the popular parlance, they might be called game-changers. They are: “Of Plymouth Plantation” by William Bradford; “The Federalist Papers,” essays published under the pseudonym Publius but written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay; “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin”; “The Journals of Lewis and Clark”; “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau; “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe; “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain; “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois; “The Promised Land” by Mary Antin; “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie; “The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care” by Benjamin Spock, M.D.; “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac; “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan.
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