Have you ever come across a non-fiction book that you would call "life changing"? Has any non-fiction book had such a powerful impact upon your beliefs or principles that it made you see life in a different light (whether in a positive or a negative manner)? Feel free to share the title(s) in this thread and tell us a bit about the influence it had on you.

Without a doubt I'd choose Thoreau's Walden. It had anthem-like qualities for me as a teenager, and I think it still influences me. It's not that I model myself after HDT--in fact I push back at him to a degree--but I admire most of the values the book embodies. Most of all, I love the writing.

Of all the wonderful books I have read over the last years, one that had a significant impact on how I view life, health, ageing and mortality were Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. In Being Mortal, Atul Gawande reveals the suffering that comes from the inescapable realities of how our society deals aging and death. It is a raw and important view into how doctors and family members, uncomfortable with dealing with our inevitable mortality, fall back on false hopes and treatments that are actually shortening lives instead of improving them.

Tattoos on The Heart - The Power of Boundless Compassion by Gregory Boyle is a book that shows the struggle of gang life, and how it is difficult to break the cycle once you are in it. Boyle shows that when we show compassion without limits, we can move past a person's past decisions and provide avenues of hope for the future. I truly enjoyed the authors approach to life, sense of humor which permeates this book, and the message it conveyed.

My formative non-fiction books were providers of intellectual structure. It was interesting to read here about people who were changed or shaped by essays and expressions of values.

"Habits of the Heart" by Bill Bellah, et al, would not be life-changing for most, but it gave me words and concepts to express a deeply felt experience in my own life, that living for what we might call 'advantage' is cold and isolating, and that communities who can sustain warmth, mutuality and support depend on a vocabulary of purpose greater than the individual.

Likewise "I and Thou" gave me a vocabulary for understanding how the sacredness of other people taps my own deepest sense of how meaning works. The book is still waiting to be written that unpacks the neuropsychology of it, but I am convinced that instrumental thinking, in which others become means to an end, cuts us off from an otherwise immediate experience of the radiance of living.

"Getting to Yes" explained the "how to" of win/win negotiation. Everyone should read it.

I might tentatively add "Thinking, Fast and Slow." I have not even finished it, years after beginning it, but its implications for understanding mental processes are so far-reaching that I keep running into them in the most unlikely places.

For me it is "The Alchemist" From Paul Coehlo

I really enjoy reading memoirs and while life changing is a heavy concept, i do think If I Had to Tell it Again by Dr Gayathri Prabhu was very impactful for its stylistic choice and truth about alcoholic father and childhood abuse. It is a treatise which gives voice to conversations which could have been had. It does what Gail Honeyman's Eleanor Oliphant is Completrey Fine in fiction.

I recently read Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. Seeing the hardships of war and how people came out beaten, battered and emotionally scarred and yet still managed to find forgiveness in their hearts inspires me to look past what suffering in my life is trivial by comparison.

I found that one a very moving and inspiring story as well. Kind of strange how the camp commander settled on the main character, Zamperini, as his designated victim, seemingly trying to prove his ideology that foreigners are weak. And it's unclear how Zamperini found the inner resources to endure, except that his time on the life raft, complete with a vision, seems to have changed him.

Maybe all of us could benefit from a near-death experience to put things in perspective? Initiation rites used to serve that purpose. I don't think the suffering in each of our lives is trivial, (some more than others, of course), but a sense that it comes with the territory is part of getting ourselves together to overcome it, I think.

Two truly life changing books for me were The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg and The End of Dieting by Dr. Joel Fuhrman. These two combined enabled me to radically change my diet over a period of three years. But even more, I am using the principles of that success to improve other areas of my life.

Although I wouldn't say my skills as an author could achieve a life changing status, I try to believe that what I am writing matters enough to change the systems we live under. My book, although published on Kindle under the title Forty years of slavery: My enslavement, has been buried by search engines because it contains a philosophy that for example explains the truth about "The Atom". It speaks about the life choices we make and the consequences of them, the struggles for employment, drugs and children and so forth. It describes life under a ruling class, I call the Oligarchy, that dictates to us our lives. I think the book applies to the world but I have intentionally made some references to Australia because I don't want it to influence your politics. It was written in a day and edited for three days. I am a new author and the first edition contains some small, minor grammatical errors that are being revised for a re-upload sometime soon. It indicates the haste I felt in publishing and getting the word out. I hope that, if you do read it, that you show some leniency to this rushed attempt to speak the truth. The truth comes before the literary art-form doesn't it?

A Confession by Leo Tolstoy. It describes his search for the answer to the question:"What is the meaning of life?." I was impressed by how openly he writes about his innermost thoughts.

Published in 1903, The Autobiography of a Thief by Hutchins Hapgood is one of those books you really get something out of. The link provided is the audio version provided by LibriVox.

His short story, How Much Land Does a Man Need?, is a personal favorite.