From the Los Angeles Times:
Books do change things: Just think of “Common Sense,” which lighted the fuse of the American Revolution, or “Mein Kampf,” which laid out the blueprint for Hitler’s Germany.
These are very different books — one a work of hope and human decency, the other as venal a piece of writing as I’ve ever read — but what they have in common is a kind of historical imperative, the sense that, at the right place and time, a book can be a galvanizing factor, for good or ill.
