I can’t believe I am already hosting my third Nonfiction November! This week, I want to know what books really opened your mind this year. Here’s the prompt!
Nonfiction November 2024 Mind Openers prompt
One of the greatest things about reading nonfiction is the way it can open your eyes to the world around you—no plane ticket required. What nonfiction book or books have impacted the way you see the world in a powerful way? Is there one book that made you rethink everything? Is there a book that, if everyone read it, you think the world would be a better place?
I’ve loved introducing this prompt to Nonfiction November—first as Worldview Changers, then as Worldview Shapers, and now as Mind Openers. However I word it, I really just want to know if any books have shifted your perspective! These are the nonfiction books you’re thinking about long after you’ve finished them, aspects of which you keep seeing everywhere. They’re books that you find yourself repeatedly telling your friends to read.
Link up your post here or at the bottom of this post!
My mind opener book
Personally, I would have to say that the book that has most dramatically shifted the way I see things this year was Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti. Parenti lays out how the U.S. mass media has a conservative, capitalist bias that we may not see because it is covert. But I talked all about Inventing Reality in my Week 3 post (which I only got up on Saturday, oops!) so definitely check that out if you haven’t!
Instead, I want to tell you about a very different book that has certainly stuck with me all year. Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong, is a collection of essays by a diverse group of talented disabled authors, almost all of whom have intersecting marginalized identities.
Unspeakable Conversations
The book opens with a heartrending essay from the late disabled activist and lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson. Johnson tells of her experience “debating” Peter Singer on the topic of, um… whether “it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn’t consider them ‘persons.'” Her opening paragraph will grab you and not let you go till somehow you’ve just finished the entire book.
He insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.
Harriet McBryde Johnson, “Unspeakable Conversations,” first published in the New York Times in 2003, republished in Disability Visibility in 2020
Disability Visibility
For how much this book impacted me, it was relatively easy to get through. Reading can be such a chore for me, despite it being one of my biggest hobbies—which is probably why I read so few books this year. Besides “Unspeakable Conversations,” the essay chapters are between four and 15 pages long. It was nice to have frequent “stopping points,” but I often had great trouble putting it down because of this. “I was going to stop here, but the next chapter is so short. What’s one more? Oh look, the next one is, too…” Hence why it’s so easy to just sit and read the entire book.
You can actually tell how Disability Visibility has changed my thinking right here in this post. My original title for this prompt was “Eye Openers,” but I thought that it would be better to use more inclusive language, especially as I’m highlighting a book by and about several blind, deafblind, or otherwise visually impaired people. Changing the title to “Mind Openers” isn’t a huge thing, but it shows you how books like these can help more folks adjust the way they think about some of the most marginalized people.
Alice Wong has another book out now titled Disability Intimacy: Essays on Love, Care, and Desire. I was hesitant to pick it up at first because I wasn’t too interested in reading about people’s “intimate” lives. After flipping through it, though, I realized that the essays are much more like those in Disability Visibility than I thought. The authors write about their relationships with pets, children, friends, and yes, sexual partners. I can’t wait to read it!
Link-up
What books have been mind openers this year for you? Link up your post below!
Some shocking stuff here! Thanks for hosting.
You mention Peter Singer here, not entirely in a good light, and I understand the concern. In his defence, I would like to say that Singer’s Animal Liberation opened my mind, and it did, but it was not the first to do so. The Ethics of What We Eat (with Singer as co-author) and more-so, the documentary Earthlings, first did that. Grant Foster’s little book Lies, Damned Lies, and Denial of Global Warming used wonderfully simple statistical analysis to demonstrate why we should care about climate change, but then, I didn’t need convincing so not so much mind opening as demonstrative. His Variable Star Light Curve Analysis did blow my mind and enabled me to write useful software. Calculus and Pizza made me fall in love with calculus several years ago after years of mathematical neglect on my part. Finally, Friedman and Felleisen’s The Little Lisper (and its cousins) was a beautiful application of The Socratic Method to programming. Sherry Turkle’s The Second Self was a beautiful book about the psychological aspects of computation. There are more great books I could mention, but that’s a start.
It was only after I made a friend who is disabled that I learned about the widespread obstacles the disabled face. Thank you for sharing this book.
This week of Nonfiction November is one of my favorites! Thanks for hosting. I’m adding Disability Visibility (my library has this one!) to my to-read list right away. It might also be a good pick for my book club….
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A really interesting book, thank you for sharing. I’ve had it on my radar for a while but I believe it’s US-centric and I’d like to read a similar book but set more in the UK, to get the context here understood before I branch out (obviously some things will be similar but others very different, much like racism in the US and UK). If you know of any resources, I’d love to find out about them. And thank you for hosting. I have added my post, I got a bit carried away (again!) and added a few!
I’m not sure I like the sound of this gentleman or his rather odious views but thank you for highlighting Unspeakable Conversations for us and for hosting this week.
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Our book group learned a lot from this book. I’m glad that other people are learning from it, too.
This looks and sounds like an amazing book. I can definitely see why you picked it for this theme!
Daaaaaang. So we’re talking about killing an actual baby? Not an abortion, but a baby that has made it onto planet earth and taken a breath? Just because it is has major disabilities? Like, really, really major disabilities?
Oh wow…I don’t know that I’ve ever even considered such a thing before. I don’t think my mind has ever GONE there.
I think of the poor parents that have to devote their entire lives to this child and I can see how it might cross their mind. But then there’s always that chance for a medical miracle or an unexplained miracle from God so I guess that’s what gets you through it. I’m glad I don’t have kids and will never have to think about that.
And I don’t think you could ever allow it, even if anyone thought it was an acceptable idea, because where would you draw the line?
I would rather see all these parents get more HELP with their children. I keep seeing parents of children with non-verbal autism and their lives are living nightmares. They love their children but they could really use some help.
I’m sure parents of children with other disabilities and mental challenges would appreciate some help rather than an offer to have their baby killed. Yikes.
Adding that book to my TBR!!!
I have tried three times to write my Mind Openers post. I used all the books last year! I’ll just skip it and see what everyone else posts. I didn’t read anything like that this year.
Alice Wong’s other book is so good – I actually read it first and then bought Disability Visibility! Thank you so much for hosting again!
Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince
Definitely adding your recommendation to my long long non-fiction list.
For me, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince, was a mind opener. It details how the world is predicted to change with the climate, forcing millions out of their lands in the first part. In the second part, it offers some possibilities for us in the (hopefully) liveable lands to prepare to accommodate immigration in healthy, constructive ways. Here in Canada we’ve been accommodating immigration fairly well but I think there’s definitely room for improvement.