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Abstract
An encounter with a book can set a person’s face in a direction that deeply influences the rest of her life. When the German-Jewish philosopher Edith Stein (1891–1942) found the The Life of Teresa of Jesus on her friend’s bookshelf, she spent the whole night reading it. In the morning she pronounced: “That is the truth.” She died in Auschwitz as a Catholic nun and a martyr. But when, for example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) spent whole nights as a child reading romances with his father, or when Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) became fixated on war after finding a picture magazine about the Franco-Prussian War in his father’s library, a person’s life can take a destructive turn. Such powerful encounters with books can shape one’s whole destiny.