8 Life Changing Books Malcolm X Read In Prison

Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant Written by husband and wife Will and Ariel Durant, Story of Civilization is an 11-volume set of books tracing Western history. It was written over the span of over four decades, and all the volumes together add up to almost 10,000 pages. The series seems to be left unfinished though because in the first volume Our Heritage, the Durants wrote that they wanted to continue the history all the way through the early 20th century. The authors both died in the 1980s, ending the series with The Age of Napoleon. The Outline of History by H.G. Wells Subtitled either The Whole Story of Man or Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, The Outline of History first came out in an illustrated version of 24 installments beginning on Nov. 22 1919, and wasn't printed in a singular volume until 1920. Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois Published in 1903, the book is a compilation of essays on race. Some of the essays had already been published in Atlantic Monthly Magazine. It is known as one of the earlier sociology pieces. Du Bois supposedly wrote it to inform the reader of “the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century." Sex and Race by J.A. Rogers Written by Jamaican-American author Joel Augustus Rogers, Sex and Race talks of Black achievement and aims to show that there is no scientific basis for race because a large percentage of the world's population is "mixed" with Black or African ancestry. Gregor Mendel Findings in Genetics by Gregor Mendel An excerpt from Malcom X's autobiography reads "Mr. Muhammad's teaching about how the white man had been created led me to Findings In Genetics by Gregor Mendel. (The dictionary's G section was where I had learned what "genetics" meant.) I really studied this book by the Austrian monk. Reading it over and over, especially certain sections, helped me to understand that if you started with a black man, a white man could be produced; but starting with a white man, you never could produce a black man -- because the white chromosome is recessive. And since no one disputes that there was but one Original Man, the conclusion is clear." Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 by Fanny Kemble Published in 1863, Fanny Kemble's journal went out of print for almost a century. The journal described life in the antebellum South. The book followed her life from 1838 to 1839. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, is an anti-slavery novel published on March 20, 1852. Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling book of the 19th century next to the Bible and is credited with helping the abolitionist movement in the 1850s. It sold 300,000 copies in the United States in the first year after publication. Friedrich Nietzsche Works by Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche Malcolm X reportedly was interested in German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche because he had heard they laid the groundwork for fascist and Nazi philosophy. However, he personally did not think too highly of them.

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