cover image The Book That Changed My Life: Discover the Must-Read Books That Transformed 71 Remarkable Authors

The Book That Changed My Life: Discover the Must-Read Books That Transformed 71 Remarkable Authors

, . . Gotham, $17.50 (197pp) ISBN 978-1-59240-210-6

As a teenager in a Parisian expatriate's bookstore, James Atlas found Gwendolyn Brooks's Selected Poems and realized that "poetry could emerge out of the geography of your own experience." Jacquelyn Mitchard named a baby after the struggling heroine of Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn ; Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged "jarred" Nelson Demille into "thinking outside the box"; Michael Stern was transported to unknown worlds by the Sears catalogue; while Sen. Joe Lieberman, an observant Jew, was molded by the Bible. In this uneven collection of often predictable musings about their favorite books by a catchall of writers (including PW 's editor, Sara Nelson), one of the few standouts is by Frank McCourt, who tastes a line from Shakespeare's Henry VIII when he's a 10-year-old typhoid patient and remembers "it's like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words." Unfortunately, by stuffing 71 writers into a slim volume, bookseller Coady and editor Johannessen all but ensure prosaic snippets of random thoughts rather than developed essays. The format also allows for repetition (J.D. Salinger; Harper Lee) and self-promotion (Carol Higgins Clark's inspiration was her famous mother; Anita Diamant showboats about her own novel The Red Tent in a piece about Virginia Woolf). (Oct.)