In May of 1933, the Nazis burned books. And not a few. Across Germany, books were incinerated by the thousands. Under watchful Nazi eyes, obedient students gathered before large bonfires to consign to the flames the works of such German writers as Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, along with books by Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, and Helen Keller.
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These public spectacles were carried out by Hitler’s acolytes, chanting “fire oaths” with the near-orgiastic fervor that had once accompanied the burning of witches and heretics. In the most notorious of these book burnings, some forty thousand people assembled in Berlin to hear Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels proclaim, “No to decadence and moral corruption!” before they threw books into a massive conflagration.
Across America today, another daunting spectacle is taking place under the guise of morality. The country has been swept by a partisan-driven wave of book banning, censorship, and yes, in some places, threats of book burning.
School and public libraries are being purged of certain books, sometimes following a single complaint, usually about books regarding sexuality, gender, the Holocaust, and/or racism—many by writers of color. Librarians have quit in disgust or been fired; others have been viciously harassed online or physically threatened. Under the pretext of “parental rights,” the highly coordinated grievances against books have multiplied alongside a spreading attempt to scrub American history classes of anything that might cause some students to feel “shame.”
Are you frightened? I am. There is nothing new about censorship in America: attacks on books and writers are older than the nation itself.
Something is different about this well-organized and highly partisan onslaught. It is about more than a few books that are claimed to be unfit for young readers. It is a purge of ideas.
But something is different about this well-organized and highly partisan onslaught. It is about more than a few books that are claimed to be unfit for young readers. It is a purge of ideas. A rising chorus of voices has sought to powerfully counter these modern American book banners. The stakes could not be higher.
Nearly a century ago in Berlin, the “decadence and moral decay” of Thomas Mann, the “soul-shredding overvaluation of sexual activity” of Sigmund Freud, the “literary betrayal of our soldiers” in Remarque’s World War I classic All Quiet on the Western Front, and the “falsification of our history and disparagement of its great figures” justified the destruction of literature. These distant echoes from 1933 should serve as a bright, flashing red light for us.
The demise of Germany’s constitutional democracy was swift and sweeping. As a further warning, we might recall the words of German playwright Heinrich Heine, whose work was tossed into the bonfires in 1933: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.” [Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]
As a historian, I look to the past to understand the present. And here is what I see. During World War II, while the Nazis burned books and people, the United States made a remarkable decision to give books away. Under a plan launched in 1943 by a consortium of American publishers known as the Council on Books in Wartime, millions of Armed Services Editions were printed and distributed for free to Americans at war. Members of the armed services were encouraged to read more books.
Intended as a morale boost, the program introduced men and women in uniform to a wide selection of stories and ideas from a broad array of writers. Handed out to Americans serving on battleships, bombers, and in barracks around the globe, the Armed Services Editions were published under a simple motto: “Books Are Weapons in the War of Ideas.”
Today we are in a new War of Ideas. Like all wars, this one is about control, fear, and power. The opponents of books have decided that some books contain ideas that disturb a carefully ordered world, which is today predicated on sexism, racism, and white supremacy. To them, books are dangerous. These enemies of books want to limit the spread of ideas for a simple reason: books make us think.
So, first they come for the books.
This battle over books is profoundly disturbing to me. For many years, I have lived a life in books. Books made me who I am. An avid library goer from childhood, a voracious reader, a former bookseller, and a writer, I have long advocated for reading, learning, and knowing. I have always tried to champion the power of books to sharpen critical thinking, question easy assumptions, and facilitate the spread of knowledge. I believe that open books open minds.
In my first book, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (1984), I wrote about the democratization of reading in America through the revolutionary introduction of mass-produced and -distributed paperbacks, all sold for twenty-five cents, or “two bits.” In Two-Bit Culture, I identified consequential books that educated the public and shaped our culture because they were widely available and affordable. The “paperback generation” was part of a true sea change in reading and thinking.
To win this current War of Ideas we need first to acknowledge how much books matter. How they educate, inform, and inspire. We need to fight for the right to read what we want to read. And, perhaps most importantly, we simply need to read more books.
But which books? Where do we begin? There are millions to choose from—at least for now. If you seek some guidance, I am here to help.
In the spirit and style of my previous book Great Short Books: A Year of Reading—Briefly, a compilation of short novels, welcome to a compendium of some of the most consequential but concise nonfiction ever written. The World in Books offers a selection of fifty-two short but provocative works of nonfiction.
Here you will discover a curated collection of some of the world’s most influential and profound thinkers and writers and their consequential ideas. All of these fit into a roughly two-hundred-page limit, with a few occasional exceptions. Many are much shorter. This means, Gentle Reader, that each of these selections could easily be read in a week’s time or less, making for another “Year of Reading—Briefly.”
In compiling this collection, I highlighted books that provide insight, inspiration, and illumination. They range across many important ideas, issues, and isms—racism, fascism, sexism, socialism, and authoritarianism among them—along with religious freedom, creativity, and the climate crisis. Together, these fifty-two entries comprise a rich intellectual adventure, while also underscoring what has always been for me an article of faith: books matter.
That may seem obvious on its face. But a little publishing history is in order. Once upon a time in much of the Western world, there was only one set of permitted books and one accepted truth. Most of these books were in Latin, which meant few people could read them. And they were very expensive, which also limited their availability. For the most part, these books asserted the sole truth of Christianity as decreed by the Church in Rome.
The Renaissance and the spirit of humanism changed that. Bringing to light ideas from ancient sources that clashed with Christian orthodoxy, along with books increasingly written in common languages such as Italian, German, and English, the Renaissance and humanism were fueled by the revolutionary advent of Gutenberg’s press around 1440.
Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type completely altered the trajectory of history by mass-producing books, which made them vastly less expensive than the medieval era’s handwritten, illuminated manuscripts. By the end of the fifteenth century, hundreds of presses across Europe were producing hundreds of thousands of books.
The books being more widely printed and shared did not necessarily propose new ideas. The Renaissance and the flowering of humanism came about because people learned about old ideas—very old ideas from ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and the Arabic world. Many had been suppressed because they had been considered pagan heresy.
But with the increased availability of books, and the growth of European universities, literacy and education exploded. Once the exclusive purview of the aristocrat and the cleric, books became available to the many. The result was the dynamic burst of creativity and thought in Western civilization’s arts, writing, philosophy, the sciences—and religion. The printed word was central to Europe’s next great movements, the Reformation and Age of Reason.
It is this simple: open books open minds.
That is an obvious and glorious truth.
But why focus again on short books?
Reading books is a fundamental skill and valuable pleasure that has sadly fallen victim to the pressures of our times. The recent years of pandemic and political chaos have wreaked havoc on our ability to focus and read. But these events only exacerbated a deeper issue: the impact of the internet.
It is the subject explored in a provocative book titled The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by author Nicholas Carr, who diagnosed this vexing modern problem:
Over the last few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I feel it most strongly when I’m reading. I used to find it easy to immerse myself in a book or a lengthy article….The deep read that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
Carr is not alone in that struggle. It is a commonly shared problem as we bury our faces in screens. But in confronting this technological assault on our ability to focus, amid the deluge of crises we confront, one of the most useful things we can and must do is read. When I previously wrote about the therapeutic value of reading, I was unaware that this activity has a name: Bibliotherapy.
The idea can be traced to the ancient Greeks, as New Yorker writer Ceridwen Dovey explains, “who inscribed above the entrance to a library in Thebes that this was a ‘healing place for the soul.’” Dovey continues:
For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is now becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading’s effects on the brain.
While the “Bibliotherapy” described by Dovey focuses on novels, I argue that reading nonfiction conveys similar advantages. Recent studies confirm that reading books provides mental stimulation and other healthful benefits.
In a January 2023 New York Times article on regaining focus and concentration, Dana G. Smith explained:
Try deep reading (on paper). Traditionally, our brains tended to read print materials more slowly, in part because we were more likely to go back and double-check what we just read. That extra time lent itself to sophisticated mental processes like critical analysis, inference, deduction and empathy.
These are attributes we all sorely need to cultivate. So, think of reading nonfiction as another form of fitness. Reading short books, I contend, is like the “high-intensity interval training”—quick bursts of vigorous activity—that we are now told is the most efficient way to stay fit.
I would suggest, to extend the exercise analogy, that an athlete aspiring to run a marathon starts training with short runs. Brief nonfiction, then, provides a form of mental and psychological workout that prepares us to bring our brains into peak condition.
Reading short books, I contend, is like the “high-intensity interval training”—quick bursts of vigorous activity—that we are now told is the most efficient way to stay fit.
Short nonfiction engages us, makes us think, helps us refocus, and primes us for longer, more challenging efforts.
But where to start? That is what The World in Books: 52 Great Works of Short Nonfiction is about. In bringing together this extraordinary array of writings, offering historical context without encyclopedic dullness, and connecting the past to the present, the history to the headlines, I hope I have provided a rich reservoir of contemplation, insight, inspiration, resistance, and perhaps even a glimmer of truth—which, as we are told, “shall set you free.”
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Excerpted from The World in Books: 52 Great Works of Short Nonfiction by Kenneth C. Davis. Copyright © 2024 by Kenneth C. Davis. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, LLC.
