According to a search I did on Wolframalpha, 129 million is the number of unique book titles in existence. In this blog I am picking my choice of book for each of the last 5 centuries. Given that not many books existed before 1500 as the printing press was not invented until 1440 I had quite a range to pick from. In this blog I am just concentrating on works of non-fiction which should cut the selection down to say, 40 million. At the end of the day this is a personal choice, however I have tried at all times to back up my choices with references from authoritative and reliable sources.
16th Century -- Montaigne's Essays
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| Highly annotated copy of The Essays |
The Essays by Michel de Montaigne is my choice for book of the 16th century. It is estimated that there are over 150 millions blogs in existence on the world wide web today. Blogging had to start somewhere and the origin of writing about oneself started in 1580 with the publication of the above. Before this it was unheard of for a writer to publish details of their private everyday actions and thoughts. I refer you to an article in the New York Times on this subject.
In The Essays, which incidentally is Montaigne's only book, he waxes lyrical on subjects as diverse as 'On prognostications', 'On smells', 'On not pretending to be ill', 'On diversion' and 'That we should not be happy till after our death'. There are 107 essays in all. In these essays we learn the following and much more:
- How to cope with a friend's death
- How to work up courage
- How to act well in morally difficult situations
- How to make most of life and prepare for death
To what is owed the success of this book and its continuing relevance today? The following quote from Andre Gide may explain:
The success of the Essays would be inexplicable but for the author's extraordinary personality. What did he bring to the world then that what was new? Self knowledge - and all other knowledge seemed to him uncertain; but the human being he discovers - and uncovers - is so genuine, so true, that in him every reader recognises himself (Gide, A 1939, p.2).
We are fortunate that The Essays survived at all given that it was banned by the Catholic Church from 1676-1854. We are fortunate they were written at all as Montaigne nearly died in a riding accident in late 1569. France suffered great upheavals during the 16th century. Civil war between Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots) raged from1562-1598. The war was made up of seven separate wars. An atrocity would take place followed by war for 2-3 years, peace would be negotiated until the next atrocity and then the cycle would start again. Bubonic plague was still very prevalent in France in the 1500's with plague on Montaigne's estate in 1585 forcing him to leave the area.
Sarah Bakewell introduces How to Live: A Life of Montaigne from George Miller on Vimeo.
Biographer Sarah Bakewell describes how she first became captivated by the sixteenth-century French writer, Michel de Montaigne. She also explains the ways in which her biography of the writer is unusual and why she thinks Montaigne still speaks powerfully to contemporary readers.
17th Century -- Spinoza's Ethics
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| Title page of The Ethics |
Of all the philosophers of the seventeenth-century, perhaps none have more relevance today than Spinoza (Nadler, S 2008). The Ethics by Baruch Spinoza is my choice of book for the 17th century. The Ethics is the author's principal philosophical work. It was finished in 1675 and first published after the author's death in 1677. The Enlightenment is said to have been sparked by this and his other works.
The Age of Enlightenment was a European cultural and intellectual movement whose aim was for society to move away from superstition and religious mantras and instead adopt reason and science as its foundation. Seven philosophers were associated with the initial process of the Enlightenment: Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Bayle and Leibniz (Israel, J p.9).
Spinoza's contribution was arguably the most crucial in crystallising what is termed Radical Enlightenment, primarily because his thought goes further than that of the other six in undermining belief in revelation, divine providence and miracles, and hence ecclesiastical authority, and also because he was the first major advocate of freedom of thought and the press as distinct from freedom of conscience, and the first great democratic philosopher (Israel, J p.10)The Ethics is not an easy read, it has a forbidding mathematical structure taken from Euclid with many definitions included and a very technical vocabulary
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| Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) |
Now bear with me here, below is a summary of The Ethics taken from The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (a peer reviewed academic resource):
A monumental work, that presents an ethical vision unfolding out of a monistic metaphysics in which God and Nature are identified. God is no longer the transcendent creator of the universe who rules it via providence, but Nature itself, understood as an infinite, necessary, and fully deterministic system of which humans are a part. Humans find happiness only through a rational understanding of this system and their place within it (Dutton, B, D 2005).
The 17th century is considered to be Amsterdam's golden age. In this era you could have your portrait painted by Rembrandt or Vermeer, make a fortune and then lose a fortune in the tulip mania or join The Dutch East India company and travel the world.
Among the great many people that Spinoza influenced over the years was the Nobel Prize winning Argentinian poet Jorge Luis Borges. Below is a YouTube video of him reading a sonnet he dedicated to Spinoza. If you were to only click on one item in this blog make it this one.
18th Century -- Smith's Wealth
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| Title page of the Wealth of Nations |
The contribution that The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, made to the understanding of what came to be called capitalism was monumental. Smith showed how the freeing of trade can very often be extremely helpful in generating economic prosperity through specialization in production and division of labour and in making good use of economies of large scale (Sen 2009).
The book I have chosen as my book of the 18th century is An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. It was published in 1776, the same year as American Independence, with the author having worked on it for ten years.
Smith was born into the small fishing village of Kirkcaldy in Scotland. He went on to be educated at Glasgow University, where he later obtained a professorship teaching moral philosophy. Little is known of the personal life of Smith who, like Spinoza, ordered his friends to destroy his private papers after his death. He was an integral member of the Scottish Enlightenment (link to informative podcast) along many other great minds including David Hume, Robert Burns, James Watt and Sir Walter Scott.
Many people quote Smith without having actually read him and economic fundamentalists have, especially since the Thatcher/Reagan era, used his words for their own purpose. This is something that can happen to all great works. Many fundamentalists argue for free unregulated markets and laissez-faire; however in another quote from economist and Noble Laureate Amartya Sen:
Smith’s economic analysis went well beyond leaving everything to the invisible hand of the market mechanism. He was not only a defender of the role of the state in providing public services, such as education, and in poverty relief (along with demanding greater freedom for the indigents who received support than the Poor Laws of his day provided), he was also deeply concerned about the inequality and poverty that might survive in an otherwise successful market economy (Sen 2009).The message to take from this is that Wealth is not only relevant to our times but it needs to be re-read, reinterpreted and revitalised.
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| Smith's statue on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh |
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| Final resting place |
19th Century -- Darwin's Species
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| Title page of The Origin of the Species |
Let me lay my cards on the table. If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and anyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law (Dennett 1995, p. 21)
The book I have chosen as my book of the 19th century is On the Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin, or to give it its full title On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
The book was first published on the 24th of November 1859, selling out the first print of 1250 copies almost immediately. Darwin had worked out the theory by 1839 and but did not publish it for 20 years. The reason for this, it has been asserted, is that Darwin feared an outcry from the establishment; however, in an article in Nature magazine, Odling-Smee (2007, p.487) argues that Darwin was determined to assemble a huge body of evidence to support his theory and to clear any stumbling blocks before publishing it in full.
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| Portrait of a young Darwin |
Darwin did not mention humankind in Origins however the essential message of the book regarding humans is summarised by Padian (2008 p.634) perfectly as follows:
Humans are animals, one species of many on the planet, bound by common ancestry to all other species, part of an age-old dance of reproduction, accommodation, survival and alternation.
presents his views on Darwin and his continuing relevance
20th Century -- Carson's Spring
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| Front cover of Slient Spring |
The 'control of nature' is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man (Carson 1962, p.243).
The book I have chosen for the 20th century is Silent Spring by American biologist Rachel Carson. Silent Spring catalogued the impact of widespread and indiscriminate spraying of DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) and other even more toxic organochlorines such as aldrin, chlordane and dieldrin on wildlife, marine life and humans alike, and questioned their use without proper investigation of their long-term effects. She meticulously describes how DDT enters the food chain and lodges in the fatty tissue of birds and animals. DDT, though first synthesized in 1874, was not discovered to be an insecticide until 1939. After World War II it was made available to farmers as an agricultural insecticide. By the late fifties more than 30,000 tons a year were being used in the United States alone. The agricultural use of DDT was banned in most developed countries in the 1970s and 1980s with Britain being one of the last, not banning it until 1984.
| Rachel Louise Carson at home with cat Moppet |
Rachel Carson's most important legacy may not be found in the laws of Congress nor in the halls of Washington's bureaucracy, but in the minds of the people. She shocked us into awareness of the deadly threat posed to present and future generations when the air, water, and soil are used casually as repositories for toxic substances.
Silent Spring was published in the 1960s, 27 September 1962 to be precise. These were times of great change and tumult in the United States and in many other parts of the world as well. The Cuban Missile Crisis happened in October 1962, the Berlin Wall was erected in August 1961 and the Soviet Union had sent the first man into space in April 1961.
Bill Moyers Journal: Remembering Rachel Carson with Kaiulani Lee from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo. Kaiulani Lee has toured with her play A Sense of Wonder, which is based on the life of Carson, for over 20 years.
Further Research
A great source for future research into books and book lists can be found here. Goodreads.com has a vast array of lists under various headings. Check out 100 most influential books ever written by Martin Seymour Smith. The Guardian has published a list of 100 greatest non-fiction books. Time magazine did something similar. Melvyn Bragg has weighed in with his own 12 books that changed the world. Here is a link to it on librarything . Project Gutenburg holds over 39000 free books. It holds 4 out of the five books above with Silent Spring the odd one out, the reason being it is still within copyright. Your local public library library should hold a copy.Conclusion
The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) of Sydney Australia has as its main corporate slogan "Seven Billion Stories and counting". Since the invention of the printing press it has been largely through the medium of books and writing that people have broadcast their stories, theories and ideas to the world. I have brought to you in this blog my choices of the last five centuries, these being the tiniest sample of what is out there and along with there being seven billion stories I am sure that there are also seven billion views on the choice of books encompassing the time span.And so finally.......
Every Sunday evening Adam Smith held a dinner at his home for a group of his close friends. His last recorded words recorded on that final Sunday were " I believe we must adjourn this meeting to another place"
Bibliography
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Sarah Bakewell Draws on Montaigne in ‘How to Live’ - NYTimes.com, 2012, viewed 16 May 2012, <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/18/books/18montaigne.html>.
Sarah Bakewell introduces How to Live: A Life of Montaigne on Vimeo, 2012, viewed 16 May 2012, <http://vimeo.com/18791643>.
Sen, A 2009, Capitalism Beyond the Crisis, The New York Review of Books, viewed 22 April 2012, <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/mar/26/capitalism-beyond-the-crisis/>.
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