Sister City Lending Library

How does someone who has lived in a repressive society their whole life carve a new society?

I was thinking of a Sister City Lending Library.
Not like sister cities that seem to be bureucracies for precious few, and boondoggle trips for elected officials. But a people:people type exchange.

What foundational books would be helpful to people in Egypt or some other Arab country that has to create an market-based economy, a free democratic society, a civil society, and a place in world? I am interested in ideas, maybe your 5 top books.

Here are some I thought of:

* Democracy in America - deToqueville. A Frenchman's view, back in the early 1800's, of civil society in America. Associations, groups, non-profits, all these organizations Americans join to make a difference in their world.

* Three Cups of Tea - Greg Mortensen & David Oliver Relin. How one man took as his mission in life to build schools in Pakistan for girls. The thought being, girls become mothers and if you teach them to read and write, they will pass it on to their children. Over generations society becomes more literate and changes. The three cups of tea part is that you can't impose your western ways (let's build a bridge today!) on other cultures, till you have first shared 3 cups of tea with them and gotten to know them, and they you.

* One-hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Well, its a classic. Generations of one family in Columbia, who worked on a banana plantation. Politics, corporate power, magic realism style.

* Shalimar the Clown - Salmon Rushdie. Maybe because another of his book's was banned (Satanic Verses), this one wasn't. The tale of a tightrope walker from Kashmir, living in LA, who goes back to Kashmir. Amazing detail on the political circumstances and history of Kashmir who goes back there. Truly amazing, and he has got to be one of the world's best authors.

* Second Treatise of Government - John Locke. A foundational work about what civil society is about, the natural rights to freedom of all people. Written in 1690 and influential in the founding of American Democratic principles. Thank you to "Philosophy Talk" on OPB for putting this in my head recently.

* The Body Snatchers - Jack Finney (or, the movie version, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" - original from 1956, but other versions too). Maybe the I-Ching of all movies, yet how is it foundational? Like the Stepford Wives, the message is that you cannot conform for the benefit of a smooth and polite society. Democracy is messy, everyone has different ideas, there are power struggles, the constant pull and tug of humanity. This is ok - you do not want to be snatched by a seed pod in the middle of the night so that society can be compliant.

* Small is Beautiful - Economics as if People Mattered - E.F. Schumacher. A classic from the 1970s. Maybe the key to a new economy is to encourage small enterprise.

* Banker to the Poor - Muhammad Yunus. Have not read this, but he pioneered the idea of microfinance (small loans to individuals to start small enterprises, maybe even as little as $50 to get started). He won a Nobel Prize for his economic ideas.