How to Be - Nicolson, Adam
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Nicolson crafts a geography of the ancient world and a brilliant exploration of our connections to the past. What is the nature of things? What is justice? How can I be myself? How should we treat each other? Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests. Twenty-five hundred years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbor cities, a few heroic men and women decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own thinking minds to the conundrums of life. These great innovators shaped the beginnings of western philosophy. Through the…mehr

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Produktbeschreibung
Nicolson crafts a geography of the ancient world and a brilliant exploration of our connections to the past. What is the nature of things? What is justice? How can I be myself? How should we treat each other? Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests. Twenty-five hundred years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbor cities, a few heroic men and women decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own thinking minds to the conundrums of life. These great innovators shaped the beginnings of western philosophy. Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. Heraclitus, in Ephesus, was the first to consider the interrelatedness of things. Xenophanes of Colophon was the first champion of civility. On the Aegean island of Lesbos, the early lyric poets Sappho and Alcaeus asked themselves, "How can I be true to myself?" On Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy, where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms. The award-winning writer Adam Nicolson travels with us through this transforming world and asks what light these ancient thinkers can throw on our deepest preconceptions. Enhanced with maps, photographs, and artwork, How to Be is an expedition into early ideas. Nicolson takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and makes the fundamental questions of the ancient philosophers new again. What are the principles of the physical world? How can we be good in it? And why do we continue to ask these questions? It is an enthralling, exhilarating journey.
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Autorenporträt
Adam Nicolson is the author of many distinguished books on history, landscape, and great literature. He is the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the W. H. Heinemann Award, and the Ondaatje Prize. His books include Life Between the Tides and Why Homer Matters. He lives on a farm in Sussex, England.
Rezensionen
A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

'What links all Nicolson's writing, though, is a tireless and tigerish sense of wonder and curiosity; a bounding willingness to immerse himself and his reader deeply in his subject: life... I'm not sure I've ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a sense of fun. How to Be delivers wholeheartedly on the promise of its vaunting title. It is like a net strung between the deep past and the present, a blueprint for a life well lived'

OBSERVER

'This eminently readable tour of Greek philosophy from approximately 650 to 450 B.C. brings the 'sea-and-city world' of Heraclitus and Homer to life . . . [He shows] the early Greeks developed intellectual habits, chief among them the use of questioning as the basis of knowing, which laid the groundwork for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and for how we reason today'

NEW YORKER

'Wise, elegant . . . richer and more unusual than [the self-help genre], an exploration of the origins of Western subjectivity'

WASHINGTON POST

'Seductive... a poetic tour of philosophical thought'

SPECTATOR

'Passionate, poetic, and hauntingly beautiful, Adam Nicolson's account of the west's earliest philosophers brings vividly alive the mercantile hustle and bustle of ideas traded and transformed in a web of maritime Greek cities.. In this life-affirming, vital book, those ideas sing with the excitement of a new discovery' David Stuttard

'It's hard not to be dazzled by this book ... No one else writes with the originality, energy and persuasiveness of Adam Nicolson. It's like encountering the Greek sea. It takes your breath away' Laura Beatty, bestselling author of Lost Property

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