What do they say on LinkedIn? Some personal news? Whatever. I’m one of the judges for this year’s Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction—and I had the signal pleasure of revealing the shortlist of six books at the Cheltenham Literature Festival last week. One of those six will now go on to win the final prize when it is announced on 19th November.
You should, of course, go out and buy them from your local bookshop, or borrow them from your local library. It is a diverse list for diverse tastes—from a biography of the artist Paul Gauguin, Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing, to an account of Indonesia’s struggle for independence in the 1940s, David Van Reybrouck’s Revolusi—though it is unified by some very modern concerns. The colonial legacy. The rise of the east. The threat of the bomb. It feels weird to say that I’m proud of something that it based entirely on the brilliant work of others, but I’m proud of this shortlist—and trust that my fellow judges are too.
But that’s not really why I’m writing this missive. What really got my thinking was what followed the shortlist announcement, when I joined Toby Mundy, who runs the Baillie Gifford Prize, and Johanna Thomas-Corr, the chief literary critic of The Times and Sunday Times, on stage to discuss “The Books that Changed the World”. Each of us had to pick a non-fiction book, from the past 100 years of so, and make a case for it. The choices ranged from the sublime (Toby picked John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, Johanna went for Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl) to the ridiculous… but I’ll get on to my own selection shortly.
First, however, I’d like to take you through my thought process. Because when I started wondering about the non-fiction books that have changed the world over the past century, I started off—as so many readers might—with the books that have changed me. How much I longed to talk about Michael Herr’s Dispatches or Theodore H White’s The Making of the President series, both of which made me want to become a journalist. Or Danny Sugarman’s No One Here Gets Out Alive, which made me want to become Jim Morrison.
Naturally—even as solipsistic as I am—I soon realised that changing me isn’t quite the same as changing the world. And while it’s no small thing that books change the inner lives of their readers, that wasn’t what the event seemed to be calling for, which was something more tangible and quantifiable.
So my mind turned instead to other titles, like Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London (which moved sociology away from cold statistics and towards warm human voices, influencing welfare and housing policy along the way) and Thomas S Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (which tested to breaking point the idea that scientific history is a history of constant incremental progress). These books certainly did wreak change in the world beyond their pages.
And yet, while either of those choices would have been eminently worthy, they didn’t prevent this scratching sensation in the back of my head; a needling voice that said something like, “But what about Delia?” You’ve surely heard about The Great Cranberry Crisis of 1995, when a recipe by Delia Smith caused such a rush on cranberries that supermarkets ran out of the fruit altogether. I think that was technically a result of one of her television episodes—but her books have had similar effects, such as the 1.3m-a-day increase in eggs sales after the publication of How to Cook.
Now that really is change, I thought: change in people’s everyday behaviours. So I was all set to pick How to Cook for the Cheltenham event, when I started wandering around the possibilities in my head. Very few books actually change the world in material ways. There are cookbooks. Religious texts, though we were steering clear of those. But what about self-help books, which are written precisely to get people to adapt their everyday behaviours? Yes, why not a self-help book?
Very few books actually change the world in material ways
Which is how I ended up picking… Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I know I hinted, above, that this is a ridiculous choice, but that was actually a bit of winning, Carnegie-esque self-deprecation on my part. It’s not a ridiculous choice at all. This 1936 book is said to have sold over 30m copies in its lifetime—putting it in the rankings of the best-selling books ever—and still, apparently, clears 250,000 copies each year. It’s been updated and translated more frequently and more assiduously than almost any other work. It is the primogenitor of the self-help genre—and counts the investment titan Warren Buffett among its happy readership. It is change in paperback form.
What surprised me most of all, when reading How to Win Friends last week, is how good it is. Carnegie was a wide-ranging fellow who began his life in poverty on a Missouri farm, started selling correspondence courses, tried his hand at acting, found himself teaching public speaking, and ended up creating a secular form of religion for people who wanted to succeed in spite of the Great Depression—and all of that is somehow within the book. It has an easy, demotic style that was very modern even before its modernisation for an edition released in 1981, 26 years after Carnegie’s death. There are dozens of good anecdotes within its pages, particularly if you’re into US politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
(Did you know? One of the most intemperate letters of Abraham Lincoln’s career was one he wrote to union General George Meade for what he perceived as the general’s failure to rout the confederate army of Robert E Lee during the Battle of Gettysburg. It was discovered, unsent, among Lincoln’s papers after his death; the good ol’ president was simply transferring the rage from his chest on to paper. The moral? In Carnegie’s aphoristic words, “Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”)
Of course, it’s easy to scoff at Carnegie’s all-American sermonising, the way he reduces history, philosophy and human nature to a series of go-getting catchphrases. Indeed, there is something in Sinclair Lewis’s wonderful contemporary observation that How to Win Friends merely taught people to “smile and bob and pretend to be interested in other people’s hobbies precisely so that you may screw things out of them.” And we might go even further than Lewis did: there are the seeds of the social-media age, of accumulating rather than cultivating friendships, in Carnegie’s work. There are certainly the seeds of all the worse self-help books that would follow—including perverse variations on the form, such as Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Living.
But much of the sneering aimed at How to Win Friends neglects to recognise that what seems platitudinous now is precisely so because Carnegie did it first. He established the template. He changed things—not just for the better. Though try making that latter argument to the millions upon millions of people who have devoured his work and benefited from it.
These may seem like moot points, but to literary editors—and I am one of them—they are not. There is a whole realm of literature—of culture, in fact, from soap operas to mobile games—that isn’t really mentioned at literary festivals, in arts pages, on radio programmes. And the truth is that so much of it is banal or just plain bad, but it’s still highly significant.
Should we ignore best-selling recipe books, management manuals and self-help guides? Or is there some way to cover them in a way that is insightful without being unduly deferential? A newsletter or podcast that rounds up the latest self-help books to help sort the wheat from the charlatanry? These were the questions running through my head on the train back from Cheltenham. If you’ve got any answers, do email me at peter.hoskin [at] prospect-magazine.co.uk
In the meantime, I’d advise you to pick up the books on the Baillie Gifford Prize shortlist. They are all categorically better than How to Win Friends and Influence People, but will they change the world to the same extent? It’s no knock on those authors and those works to say: probably not.
This article originally appeared in Prospect’s The Culture newsletter, which is available exclusively to magazine subscribers. You can sign up for a subscription here
