Why read How to Be?

Book cover of How to Be

Book description

A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

What is the nature of things? Must I think my own way through the world? What is justice? How can I be me? How should we treat each other?

Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and…

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Why read it?

1 author picked How to Be as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Julian Caldecott

Author

Adam Nicolson is an astonishing polymath who writes like an angel. In How to Be, he resurrects the lives of key actors in the first flowering of ancient Greek thought. These were people of a complex geography of islands, ports and trade routes in the eastern Mediterranean, from coastal Turkey to southern Italy and Sicily. He shows how this geography shaped their mindsets and ideas on existence (ontology), experience (phenomenology), the afterlife (eschatology), ethics (axiology), and much else. In Nicolson's hands their ideas feel fresh again, and the individuals as startling as they must have been in life. First up…

From Julian's 3 favorite reads in 2024.