The Year's Books

U.S. book lovers, their eyes alight with Christmas benefaction, filed into book stores last week and found that one of the most momentous years in history had produced one of the most unstimulating book lists on record.

Only last Christmas, the German armies in their last great lunge had bulged through the Allied lines in Belgium, and it looked as if they could not be halted short of Antwerp. Since then Germany had been smashed to pieces, Japan had bowed itself into national nonentity, the atom bomb had been dropped. The bomb that obliterated Hiroshima had blown apart man's conscience and his sense of civilized security. For the first time in history man, who still could not inform with life one submicroscopic particle of matter, found within his grasp the power to destroy creation.

Of this cosmic drama scarcely anything was reflected in the year's books. There was almost no fiction of consequence. There was a scatterfire of biography (none of it first-rate), a broadside of correspondents' books (all dating rapidly), some history of no particular moment, no outstanding books of criticism, little poetry.

Only two topical books, General Marshall's Report--The Winning of the War in Europe and the Pacific and Professor Henry de Wolf Smyth's Atomic Energy for Military Purposes (popularly known as the Smyth Report on the atom bomb) measured up at all to the year's massive events. And in a field not commonly of concern to laymen, there appeared, not by plan, but apparently in response to a growing human need, a swatch of books on philosophy, religion and related subjects.

Of these the most notable both for mass (895 pages) and specific intellectual gravity was Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (Simon & Schuster, $5). Philosopher Russell's History chronicles in simple style, with immense knowledge, with highly personal (and often highly prejudiced) commentary and rigorous rationalism, the rise of Western philosophy from Thales (B.C. 640) to Philosopher Russell. It also discusses great religions (Greek polytheism, Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism) and a number of thinkers whom philosophers do not consider philosophers but whose thought and actions have been important to man's mind (St. Francis, St. Benedict, Karl Marx, Machiavelli, Byron). There are expositions of great books, Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Spinoza's Ethics, and the History is almost as full of poems as an anthology.

Bertrand Russell is a rationalist, a materialist, a devotee of science (he is one of the greatest of living mathematicians). To him science is truth. Religion is a mote that does not trouble but tickles the mind's eye. Faith moves him to irony, not reverence. Some readers may feel that many of the philosophers whose systems he expounds disprove the connection between political and social conditions that he postulates. But few would deny that for laymen A History of Western Philosophy is a highly readable introduction to a difficult subject.

Man's faith and mind were approached in a very different way in two other books, The Yogi and the Commissar (TIME, June 4) by Arthur Koestler, brilliant ex-Communist novelist (Darkness at Noon), and The Perennial Philosophy (TIME, Oct. 1) by Novelist Aldous Huxley (Antic Hay, Brave New World). Koestler's book was a series of essays; its theme: modern man is caught between the choice of a philosophy of action (The Commissar) and a philosophy of quietism (The Yogi). Man's hope: a synthesis of the two. Author Koestler was more optimistic than hopeful.

Novelist Huxley's book, reflecting a growing, uneasy sense of the inadequacy of a purely rationalistic approach to God, included excerpts from many unfamiliar European mystics and religious thinkers (Francis of Sales, St. Teresa, Eckhart, Boehme), even more unfamiliar Asiatics (Jalaluddin Rumi, Visvanatha, Chuang Tzu).

Two books which were not strictly philosophic or religious but which implied profound philosophic and religious issues were William Aylott Orton's The Liberal Tradition (TIME, Dec. 3) and Norman Cousins' Modern Man Is Obsolete. Professor Orton's book sought to trace the decomposition of liberalism through the loss of its spiritual content. Author Cousins' 59-page essay is written with a kind of urgency less eloquent than headlong. When the atom bomb vaporized Hiroshima, he says, it rendered obsolete "every aspect of man's activities, from machines to morals, from physics to philosophy, from politics to poetry." If man does not wish to become extinct as well as obsolete, he must do something at once. What he must do, cries Cousins, is to create a world superstate. He cites the example of the 13 American colonies, which Benjamin Franklin said, must hang together or they would all hang separately. The nations which survived World War II must hang together or face annihilation in World War III.

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