If You Could Add One Book to the High School Curriculum, What Would It Be? | Books - New York Times

Teachers often turn to the same tried and true books for high school reading assignments. So we asked a group of writers: What books would you add to the curriculum? Here are their answers.

If you’re a teacher and you have your students read “1984” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” why not have them also read “Parable of the Sower,” by Octavia E. Butler?

Students sometimes show up at college with the idea that economics is some kind of master science. Worse, some of them leave with that idea reinforced. 
Robert L. Heilbroner’s THE WORLDLY PHILOSOPHERS is an inoculation against that mistake. An accessible but serious study of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and more, it presents economics as “the science that has sent men to the barricades” to fight over how people should live together. This book is a resource for a time when young people have realized that those fights are not settled, when students are once again puzzling and struggling over political economy, from Trumpist kleptocracy to libertarianism to democratic socialism. — Jedediah Purdy, author of “After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene”
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Source: New York Times