The Philosopher and the Wolf
By Mark Rowlands
256 pages; Pegasus

Watch it, there's a wolf in the room. A reader of Mark Rowlands's fierce meditation The Philosopher and the Wolf can only imagine what it was like to listen to the young university professor lecturing on the logic of the universe, the passions of naked apes, as his pet wolf, Brenin (along with certain students), dozed nearby. A snarly misanthrope, Rowlands recovered his own humanity by loving a noble beast and (with a little help from Aristotle, Descartes, and Jack Daniel's) learning to howl at the moon.