The Philosophers’ Library: Books that Shaped the World by Adam Ferner and Chris Meyns

Relentless focus on intellectual reparations

The Philosophers’ Library is an illustrated history of books on philosophy, printed in a mini-coffee table format of 8" x 9.5". Published in 2021 by Ivy Press, this is a follow-up to their similarly designed 2019 book Scientifica Historica about the history of science books. Ivy Press has since developed this into a series named Liber Historica, which now includes The Atlas of Atlases, The Anatomists’ Library, and The Astronomers’ Library. These volumes combine photographs of pages and illustrations from rare and classic books with text that one hopes would give a historical overview of the important books in the particular field in question. Like Scientifica Historica, this book is illustrated with many beautiful photographs of illuminated manuscripts and printed books. Book lovers will find it a pleasure to look at, but the text by authors Adam Ferner and Chris Meyns is not as satisfying.

Did you know that for thousands of years white men ruled the Earth, colonizing foreign lands, subduing other cultures, and stifling the voices of women and people of color? Well, in case you didn’t know that, the authors of this book remind you of it in almost every paragraph. For much of philosophy’s history, white men were the only people allowed to practice, teach, or disseminate philosophical thought. Why not just assume that your readers are intelligent enough to know that, instead of continually repeating the known fact of white colonialism? That could have been covered in a disclaimer or preface at the front of the book, so we could get on with the discussion of philosophy. Instead, all we’re told here about almost all white philosophers is that they were racists. While the effort to present a more inclusive canon is a good thing, so much space is used up in caveats on colonialism, slavery, the expatriation of cultural artifacts, and the intellectual bias enforced by white power structures that there is little left to devote to the thoughts of the thinkers discussed. While the field of philosophy has many facets, the only philosophical issues that Ferner and Meyns are interested in are racism, feminism, and colonialism. There’s almost nothing in here about epistemology, for example, and very little on ethics outside of race and gender ethics. On the other hand, the authors allow a very broad definition of philosophy that includes just about any nonfiction book that supports their interests, from history to memoir to race and gender studies.

Ferner and Meyns are to be commended, however, for striving to make this a true world history of philosophy, rather than just a recap of Western civilization. There is much more in this book about Arab, Indian, Chinese, and Japanese philosophy than you are likely to find in any other summary survey of the discipline. And when it comes to these Eastern philosophies, the authors spend less time talking about racism, so you actually get a better idea of what these non-Western thinkers had to say. I wish there had been a bibliography, or at least of list of books discussed as in Scientifica Historica, that would make it easier to track down some of these titles in English translation.

Scientifica Historica succeeded in telling readers just enough about important historical books to make the reader think, “That’s a book I might like to read.” When you read a book about the history of books, you should come away with a reading list. With The Philosopher’s Library, you don’t learn enough about any of these philosophers or their books to accomplish that. Instead of walking away from this feeling like you got a concise but comprehensive history of philosophy that somewhat conveys an academic consensus of what’s important in the field, you feel more like you just listened to two scholars expound at length on their personal research interests, pet issues, and favorite authors.

The Stoic by Theodore Dreiser

More railroads and romance with Frank Cowperwood, this time in London

Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Stoic, first published in 1947, is the third book in his Trilogy of Desire, preceded by The Financier and The Titan. Together, the three novels chart the life and career of Frank Algernon Cowperwood, a tycoon in the business of streetcars, subways, and urban railroads. In The Financier, Cowperwood built his career in Philadelphia. In The Titan, he suffered financial ruin and public disgrace through his unethical business practices. In The Stoic, Cowperwood has fled Chicago to find temporary solace in New York before deciding to venture to England and try monopolizing the London railways.

Although still married to his second wife Aileen, Cowperwood, now about 60, has commenced an affair with 20-year-old Berenice Fleming, whom he has groomed to be his mistress since he met her as a teenager. His relationship with Berenice is probably the closest he’s ever felt to love, but he wants to maintain his marriage to Aileen to keep up appearances, because scandal would hurt his business ventures. To keep Aileen occupied and to ease his philandering conscience, Frank clandestinely hires a boy toy to keep her company. While Aileen enjoys the young man’s attentions, she still has hopes of winning Frank’s heart back from the hated Berenice. This love triangle spends most of the novel shuttling back and forth from London to New York while Cowperwood schemes to keep the two women apart.

With books like Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, and An American Tragedy, Dreiser earned a reputation as one of America’s great literary novelists, a virtuoso of sorts at crafting literature from real life. The characters of The Stoic, however, are hardly regular people, and their lives as written here often read more like soap opera than social realism. Cowperwood is not only a multi-millionaire but also a celebrity, in the way that William Randolph Hearst is depicted in Citizen Kane, or the way Donald Trump was famous before he entered politics. The fact that the characters are rich isn’t necessarily bad. The great French naturalist Emile Zola wrote several compelling novels about wealthy, high-society life, but luxury isn’t exactly Dreiser’s strong suit. On the one hand, you have Cowperwood’s railroad dealings, comprised of incredibly mundane discussions of financial and legal proceedings. On the other hand, you have his love life, which reads like some kind of sexless Danielle Steele potboiler. Most of the book feels somewhat like a repetitive rehashing of The Titan, except for the fact that in this book Frank and his ladies travel all over the globe. The novel does improve towards the end, however. The last several chapters take some unexpected turns, not so much plot twists but rather events and subject matter that make you think hmmm, I never would have expected Dreiser to write about that.

In addition to being Cowperwood’s final appearance, The Stoic was also Dreiser’s last book. He died while writing it. His wife Helen cobbled together his remaining notes into one final chapter, but the book was pretty much complete anyway and would have ended better without this posthumous addition. As a whole, Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire is an above-average work of American realism but hardly a masterpiece. An American Tragedy and Jennie Gerhardt are much better. If you’ve read those books and appreciate Dreiser’s brand of naturalism, however, then living through three volumes with Frank Cowperwood is not a bad way to spend one’s reading time.

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The Plague by Albert Camus

Life and death in a city under quarantine

The Plague, a novel by Algerian-French author Albert Camus, was first published in 1947. Camus would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature a decade later. The Plague is probably Camus’s second-best-known work, after The Stranger. Though the two books are unrelated, they share a similar bleak tone. Both novels take place in Algeria, where Camus, the grandson of French colonists, was born.

As The Plague opens, the city of Oran is being overrun with rats. They appear in droves, only to die in heaps in the streets. The cause of their demise is the bubonic plague, which soon, by way of the rodents’ fleas, spreads to the city’s human inhabitants. As the death toll climbs, and the nature of the pandemic is determined, the entire city of Oran is placed under quarantine, cut off from the outside world. The book follows the lives of a handful of characters living under these conditions. Most prominent among them is Dr. Bernard Rieux, a physician who eventually ends up leading efforts to halt the spread of the disease.

For most of its shelf life, I’m sure The Plague was a very powerful and disturbing novel. For today’s readers, however, the book has lost some of its impact due to the simple fact that we recently lived through a real plague-and-quarantine scenario with the COVID-19 virus. I would imagine death by bubonic plague is more gruesome than a COVID death, but the fear, paranoia, isolation, and grief engendered by one fatal epidemic is comparable to the other. In both cases, many people were separated from their loved ones for lengthy periods of time. In some ways, the COVID lockdown was even worse than what Camus describes in The Plague. Here Oran is isolated from the outside world, but its citizens are still free to go out and mingle in public spaces, seemingly oblivious to possible contagion. (Granted, there was no internet in the 1940s, so they couldn’t very well work from home or shop online). No mention is made of masks being worn except for one instance late in the book. Camus gives due attention to the hardships and overwork faced by medical personnel, both professionals and volunteers, but unlike in real life his doctors and nurses seem immune to the disease they’re treating.

The plague itself is not so much the focus of the book, but rather the psychological effects of living in isolation under the constant threat of death. Although the novel does include some scenes of realistic melodrama involving illness, death, and grief, the overall tone, as one might expect from Camus, is one of deadpan fatalism. While the characters try to cling to the illusion that they have some control over their own destinies, Camus emphasizes that their lives are at the mercy of indiscriminate nature in the form of the lethal plague bacteria. Each character in his own way tries to find meaning and dignity in this rather meaningless extermination of human life.

The novel’s most unforgiveable fault is its lack of female characters. Camus writes the book almost as if women don’t exist in Oran, but for one main character’s mother who plays a minor supporting role. Some of the male characters are separated from their wives and lovers, who are off in faraway cities. This allows Camus to address the issue of romantic relationships interrupted by quarantine, but it makes for a rather abstract way to go about doing it. There is no example given of a couple undergoing the plague together, nor is a single case of a woman’s experience of the plague presented at all. Even Hemingway would have included at least a nurse. While Camus perspicaciously analyzes his five male leads in admirable psychological detail, that very same narrowness of focus makes the reader feel like he’s getting a rather limited view of the scope of this catastrophe.
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The Fourth Night Watch by Johan Falkberget

Norwegian regional realism in a northern mining town

Norwegian author Johan Falkberget’s novel The Fourth Night Watch was originally published in 1923. The University of Wisconsin Press published an English translation in 1968 as part of its Nordic Translation Series. This admirable series introduced English-language audiences to many lesser-known Scandinavian authors. Several of the books in this series, including The Fourth Night Watch, are now available for free download at the University of Wisconsin Libraries website. Falkberget (1879-1967) was a very prolific author of historical novels and highly respected in his home country, but as far as I can tell, this may be the only one of his works that’s ever been translated into English.

This is one of the better books in the Nordic Translation Series. Many of the authors featured in that series are early modernist authors whose prose is somewhat experimental in nature. Falkberget, on the other hand, comes across as a pre-modern realist whose writing exhibits similar characteristics to authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope or Emile Zola. The introduction to The Fourth Night Watch states that Falkberget was part of a regionalist movement in Norwegian literature, in which writers outside of the urban capital wrote realist novels of their home districts (similar to the regional realist movement in America during the early 20th century). The Fourth Night Watch is set in the mining region of Røros, where Falkberget was born. The story begins in 1807, about the time Norway won its independence from Denmark and entered a war against Sweden.

Benjamin Sigismund has been appointed pastor in the town of Bergstaden, in the Røros mining district. He relocates his family from Christiania (later renamed Oslo), and they take up lodging in rather shabby rented rooms. At first, Sigismund and his wife are appalled by the drab rustic atmosphere of the town and its uncouth, working class inhabitants. Sigismund takes his calling as a man of the cloth seriously, however, and diligently sets out to save the souls of these northerners by reforming their godless ways. At first, the pastor plies his trade with a fair amount of vanity, pride, and self-righteousness, but the more time he spends in Røros the more he begins to see the country laborers as equals rather than inferiors. His position and his marriage are threatened, however, when he falls in love with Gunhild, a beautiful young married woman.

The forbidden love between Sigismund and Gunhild may sound like a familiar melodramatic trope, but here Falkberget handles the relationship realistically. The reader can identify with the feelings of unsatisfied longing, guilt, and loss that this romance engenders. Another important thread running throughout the book is Sigismund’s developing friendship with his sacristan, a blacksmith named Ole Korneliusen, or Ol-Kanalesa in the local dialect. These two characters, of differing upbringings and social classes, start out with an adversarial relationship but gradually begin to find common ground and develop a mutual admiration. Although this is not a religious novel, due to Sigismund’s profession, religion plays a major part in the story, similar to some of Balzac, Trollope, and Zola’s novels with clergyman protagonists. One of the reasons this novel is one of the more interesting entries in the Nordic Translation Series is that you really do learn a lot about Norwegian life, at least during this time period, unlike some of the more modern works in the series that are less specific in time and place. Those with an interest in Scandinavian literature and history will find The Fourth Night Watch a compelling read. Thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press for making such works available to English-language readers.  

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The Mapmakers by John Noble Wilford

Good textbooky overview of cartography up to the year 2000

A long-time science writer and editor for the New York Times, John Noble Wilford wrote the famous front-page article “Men Walk on Moon” back in 1969. Since then, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his science journalism. Wilford has also authored several books, among them The Mapmakers, first published in 1981. I read the revised edition of 2000. Judging from what I see on Amazon, I don’t believe it has been updated since then.

In The Mapmakers, Wilford chronicles the landmark achievements in cartography from ancient times to the present. If you’ve ever wondered how maps were made back in the days of sextants and theodolites, or how they are made today in the era of satellite technology, The Mapmakers is a great resource loaded with valuable information. Wilford follows the development of cartographic methods and technology from ancient geometry to today’s GPS systems, while highlighting the groundbreaking achievements of explorers and cartographers such as Ptolemy, Mercator, the Cassini family, Captain James Cook, and many other lesser-known but important luminaries in the field of mapmaking. In the 2000 edition, Wilford touches on digital technology and GIS (Geographic Information Systems), but he’s still talking about floppy disks, and he doesn’t even mention the internet. If you want to learn about current cartographic techniques, this is not an up-to-date text on the subject. As a history book, however, it does a very fine job of providing a comprehensive overview of the history of cartography through the 20th century.

I took an undergraduate intro to cartography course at a university, and this would have made a good textbook for such a course. In fact, it reads very much like a textbook, for better or for worse. The text never quite reaches the attention-grabbing, accessible prose one expects from popular science journalism. The first half of the book recounts the voyages of many explorers, stories that just about anyone interested in geography can appreciate and enjoy. The second half of the book, however, details a succession of technological advances in radar, remote sensing, and space technology that requires a reader that’s more of a cartography wonk. Though suitable for general readers, one really has to have more than just a passing interest in this subject, and perhaps some prior knowledge, in order to fully understand and appreciate this cartographic history, particularly the mathematics involved.

That said, I would fall among those interested parties for whom this book is well-suited, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. I was familiar with many of the people and achievements recounted here, but Wilford fleshed out their stories with interesting details. There was also plenty of content that was new to me. Wilford doesn’t just cover the mapping of the Earth, but also the mapping of the Moon, Mars, and interstellar space. Of course, a lot of advances have been made in those areas since 2000, but again, this is a very good history up to that point. The Mapmakers succeeds as a one-volume overview and reference on the history of cartography. By providing detailed coverage of a broad and deep range of mapmaking pioneers, achievements, and techniques, this book allows curious readers to decide which topics and historical personages are worthy of further research.  

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Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson

Prehistoric life was horny and boring

California author Kim Stanley Robinson is known for his science-fiction visions of the future, but his 2013 novel Shaman is set in prehistoric times. During the Ice Age, a young man named Loon reluctantly undergoes training to become his tribe’s shaman. Like many a teenager coming of age, he feels forced into a future he didn’t choose. The only aspect of the job that really interests him is cave painting. The story takes place at a time when homo sapiens, such as Loon and his people, coexisted with Neanderthals, referred to here as “the Old Ones,” so maybe around 45,000 years ago. Though no place names are stated, geographical features indicate that the story takes place in Europe.

Shaman is science fiction only in the sense that it is based on archaeological and anthropological science. The book contains no elements of fantasy or speculative fiction, with the exception of Robinson’s ridiculous choice of a supernatural narrator. For the most part, Robinson aims for a realistic depiction of prehistoric man. In fact, his take on Ice Age living is so realistic that, but for the fact that the characters have names, more often than not Shaman reads very much like a textbook: This is the way early man hunted and preserved their food. This is the way they executed cave paintings. This is how they undertook their seasonal migrations. This is the way they made snowshoes. The characters perform these actions for the reader as if they were mannequins in a natural history museum diorama. If I want to know about how ancient man lived, I would rather read an actual textbook, such as Handbook to Life in Prehistoric Europe by Jane McIntosh. Fiction, on the other hand, should offer drama, characterization, and plot, all of which are scanty qualities in Shaman.

Nothing resembling a plot shows up until halfway through the book, at which point some characters travel to distant lands, where we get another textbook on another tribe’s way of living. The fictional content of the book is sparse and rather dull. There is a chase scene, for example, that lasts eight chapters, and it’s largely just descriptions of snow and ice. I like the fact that Robinson didn’t go in for soap-opera melodrama or new-age mysticism like The Clan of the Cave Bear, but he should have done more to make this story interesting. He wants to convince us that stone-age humans were people too, but then he delivers very little conflict between the shallowly drawn characters as they act out some questionably Edenic caveman fantasy camp.

Something else Robinson wants you to know about prehistoric people is that apparently they were obsessed with genitalia and bodily functions. I don’t know why it is that when authors these days write about the ancient world, they feel compelled to load their prose with bodily fluids of the reproductive and digestive systems, but Robinson is only one of many who have gone that route in recent years. Is that supposed to be cutting-edge realism? Prehistoric communities probably had more open attitudes about sex and sanitation than we do, but I also think they had other things to think about, like survival.

Robinson is so concerned with describing everything in minute detail that there is little room left for a story, and what there is moves at a glacial pace. As a result, reading Shaman feels like a very long haul. The time period and subject matter would seem to offer some interesting narrative possibilities, so it’s hard to understand why this book turned out to be so boring.
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