It's interesting that the authors aren't clear about fields being fundamental, it's not even controversial. I noticed that he looked for books with the words "

It's interesting that the authors aren't clear about fields being fundamental, it's not even controversial. I noticed that he looked for books with the words "Quantum Mechanics" in the title. The subject he should be investigating is called "Quantum Field Theory". But regardless, anyone qualified to write a text book on QM should be well versed in QFT.