We were assigned The Grapes of Wrath in high school and for most people it was long, slow and boring, but that book RADICALIZED me. What books in your high school classes changed how you understood people or society?

To be more specific, chapters 19 and 21, when Steinbeck describes the lust for land and profit that turned people from farmers to owners, and the panic, the hunger, and the desperate competition between too many workers for scarce jobs that had been promised them if they left their lands in the Dust Bowl, and how the owners benefitted from that desperate competition because they could turn those people into sharecroppers. And the final chapter, where the strength of the human spirit is found within the body of a woman who owns nothing. Ohh my goodness, that book changed me. I came from an upper middle class background and I would never have understood the true meaning of the word 'exploitation', or been able to critique capitalism, in such a way as I can now, if I hadn't read this beautiful book.