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How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Name: How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Rating: 5 (6 reviews)
Author: Sarah Bakewell
ISBN: 9781590514832

Sarah Bakewell · 2010 · 416 pages

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, from the author of Humanly Possible

How to get along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love—such questions arise in most people’s lives. They are all versions of a bigger question: How do you live? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, considered by many to be the first truly modern individual. He wrote free-roaming explorations of his thoughts and experience, unlike anything written before. More than four hundred years later, Montaigne’s honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom, and entertainment —and in search of themselves. Just as they will to this spirited and singular biography.

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recommended by 6 people

sourced from public statements

Ryan Holiday
“The book is spectacular. It was a bestseller in the UK and was featured in a 6 part series in The Guardian. The format of the book is a bit unusual, instead of chapters it is made up of 20 Montaigne style essays that discuss the man from a variety of different perspectives. Montaigne was a man obsessed with figuring himself out — why he thought the way he did, how he could find happiness, his fetishes, his near-death experiences. He lived in tumultuous times too and he coped by looking inward. We’re lucky he did, and we can do the same.”↗
Anthony Bourdain
“Sarah Bakewell’s “How to Live,” on the life and work of Montaigne, is a book I love. I stole a tattoo design from it.”↗
Derek Sivers
Marc Andreessen
Nigel Warburton
Kieran Setiya