For me, it was a book called ‘The Outsiders’ by S.E Hinton. It is known as a literary classic these days, but it was quite hard hitting when it was released back in the 1960s.
In a nut shell; It is about a group of semi-impoverished greaser friends growing up in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma, and all the life challenges they face, and how they react to prejudice against them whilst coping with family issues.
It was the first book that made me realise that some people in society don’t get it easy growing up, and I discovered what it meant to live on the ‘wrong side of town’ and what societal prejudice was. The outsiders was the first novel I read that brought up hard subjects like; domestic violence, alcoholism, street gang violence etc.
It was the first book to shatter my naive way of thinking about the world, at 13 years old! It is still one of my favourite stories to this day, and for all its slightly dark themes, I love the compassionate friendship and brotherhood that is displayed in this book!
Howard Zinn: The People’s History of the United States
That book was so far ahead of its time, even compared to modern popular understandings of history. You’ll see plenty of people today criticize the hypocrisy of the founding fathers, but Zinn went deeper than that. His analysis of the actual interests they were fighting for, and how this didn’t include most Americans is profound. I love how he highlights the conflicting interests throughout American history that are usually downplayed in popular thought.
Oh hell yes! One of my favorite books. I have it on one of my bookshelves.
We were reading that in my Philosophy class along with the Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin.
Both books seemed to awaken me. But Zinn absolutely brought me out of a deep sleep.
This is the one I came in looking for. Really make it clear how much they leave out of the textbooks, and how the country has been locked into class warfare for its entire history
This is how I felt reading The Red Scarf Girl about the horrors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and how that was conveniently left out of our American textbooks.