100 Books Like Philosopher of the Heart

Probably this is my favourite and by far the saddest.

The life of Friedich Nietzsche is absolutely essential to understanding his work – perhaps to a greater extent than in any other philosopher. Everything is told here, from the time of his friendship with Wagner, his personal and physical crises and his failed attempts at marriage.

Prideaux's book reads like a novel, although Nietzsche's life is itself a tragic novel. Although it is not a detailed analysis of Nietzsche's Philosophy, this book helps to better understand the work of an essential philosopher to understand the current era. 

The figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein has always been quite enigmatic for me.

The enormous contradictions of his life and the intensity of it are difficult to understand in the abstract. Ray Monk's biography contextualizes the life and work of the Austrian philosopher who set out to solve all the problems of philosophy.

Monk's biography stands as a testament to Wittgenstein's enduring influence on our understanding of language, thought, and reality. 

Heidegger is one of those authors who are tremendously interesting but terribly difficult to understand without a good introduction to his general work and his life.

Safranski's intellectual biography is not necessarily the best introduction for a novice, but it is undoubtedly the reference work for the study of the life and work of a philosopher who is considered (along with Wittgenstein) to be the most influential of the 20th century.

Safranski skilfully navigates the complex landscape of Heidegger's life, from his formative years as a young scholar to his association with the Nazi regime during World War II. The book delves into the intellectual development of Heidegger's existential philosophy, providing an overview of his major works and ideas. 

I'll be honest, when I received Benoit Peeters' book on Derrida I was a little worried.

A 600-page tome about one of the most notoriously difficult philosophers. Fortunately, Peeters does not write in a Derridean manner and makes the life journey of the most influential thinker of postmodernism accessible and even entertaining.

Peeters covers Derrida's formative years in Algeria, his academic career, and his development of deconstruction—a philosophical approach that challenged traditional notions of language, meaning, and text interpretation. 

While Snorri wrote in his native Old Norse in Iceland, unbeknownst to him, a Danish writer remembered as Saxo the Grammarian ('Grammaticus') was writing a monumental history of the Danish kingdom in Latin. Since the old gods were held to be the ancestors of the royal families of medieval Scandinavia, Saxo spends quite a bit of time in the first nine books of 'The History of the Danes' retelling their stories. Many fans of Norse mythology who read the Eddas still never approach Saxo's work, which in fact has been mined in recent centuries for many rich details that are preserved nowhere else. Like Snorri, Saxo tries to "rationalize" the old gods into becoming misguided or deceitful human beings from the distant past, and he does a more thorough job of it, but even through this veneer, it is hard not to recognize the same characters that we know from… show more.

In focusing on her daughter, Luise, a mother, Dorrit Cato, in this extraordinary book captures all that is going wrong and getting worse in medical care today. Very early on you know what is going to happen and feel powerless to stop it. Maybe I feel this way so much because I see it happening every day. I’ve bought lots of copies and given Dear Luise to many working in healthcare, who have found it equally raw. If you only have minimal encounters with healthcare or encounters where things have gone well, you may find this story sad but think it a rare exception. Trust me, in mental healthcare today Dear Luise is the norm, and tomorrow it will be the norm for all of health.   

I enjoyed reading about the courage the young protagonist, Annemarie, had and her determination to keep her best friend safe.

Lowry’s lyrical words put you in the moment and make you feel part of that world. I learned a lot about what WWII looked outside Germany, how people reacted to it, and how many outwitted the enemy. 

I love Andersen because his stories almost out-Kafka Kafka.

His animal characters are not exactly philosophers, but they observe, they dread, they dream. Animals—like humans—rarely challenge the natural order of things, but they must deal with the world as it actually is.

One Danish critic said that Andersen wrote more self-portraits than Rembrandt ever painted. Andersen’s great contribution to literature is recognizing how little is needed to produce a story and how little a great story really needs to say. 

One story tells of a chance meeting and spurned friendship between two toys in a drawer. Andersen seems capable of turning anything into a story.

This annotated hardback edition by a folklore scholar is one of the most beautiful-looking books I own.

Since I’ve traveled a lot above the Arctic Circle, I relish a good Nordic noir.

Smilla, part Greenlander and part Dane travels from Copenhagen back to Greenland on a quest for truth about a brutal death deemed an accident.

The gripping ending included elements I found fascinating, Inuit culture, human evil, and extreme weather. 

This book is about “The Danish universe of meaning,” or, the view of the world as it is has been captured by Danish words and meanings. The work includes deep semantic analysis of cultural constructs such as hygge, roughly, ‘pleasant togetherness’ and tryghed, roughly, ‘sense of security, peace of mind,’ as well as cognitive verbs, emotion adjectives, personhood constructs, and rhetorical keywords. But Levisen’s aim is not only to study Danish—at heart, the book is about cultural semantics at large. The aim is to use Danish as a case study and to provide a new model for comparative research into the diversity and unity of meaning in European languages. To my mind, this book wonderfully succeeds in achieving this aim.