Melville House Books

“For several years, nonfiction titles containing the words ‘changed the world’ (or a variation thereon) have become a publishing standby,” to the degree that the phrase “has become enough of a publishing convention to have mutated,” observes Mark Feeney in a Boston Globe article. Feeney says the book “widely credited with popularizing it” was the surprise 1997 bestseller, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky. Now, mutations have grown to include everything from the subtitle of Ken Alder‘s book about the metric system, ‘The Measure of All things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World, to that of Lisa Wood Shapiro‘s 2004′s How My Breasts Saved the World: Misadventures of a Nursing Mother. Kurlansky has a theory: ”I am of that ’60s generation,” he says, ”and for people of my age that phrase ‘change the world’ has a real resonance . . . I think it’s pretty appealing to change the world.” Meanwhile, the Globe includes a list of recent books using the phrase, including Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World, and Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.