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A delightful, soul-enriching, sweeping new history of humanism--a grand intellectual adventure spanning from ancient Greece, through the Renaissance, to the work of James Baldwin, the present day, and beyond--by Sarah Bakewell, bestselling author of "This is a book about humanists, but even humanists cannot agree on what a humanist is," declares Sarah Bakewell. Indeed, for centuries now, thinkers, writers, scholars, politicians, activists, artists, and countless others have been searching for and refining a philosophy of the human spirit. Humanism can be found in writings of Plato and Protagoras and in the thought of Confucius. It is ever-present in the work of;Michel de Montaigne, and guided the thinking and activism of Harriet Taylor Mill. When Zora Neale Hurston writes, "Somebody else may have my rapturous glance at the archangels. The springing of the yellow line of morning out of the misty deep of dawn, is glory enough for me." ; In ; Embracing and indeed celebrating humanism''s swirling, kaleidoscopic, rich ambiguity, Bakewell sets out not just to trace this vital philosophical lineage through the lives of its major protagonists but in fact to make her own dazzling contribution to its expansive literature. The result is an intoxicating, joyful celebration of the human spirit from one of our most beloved and charming writers.;...
About the author
Sarah Bakewell had a wandering childhood, growing up on the "hippie trail" through Asia and in Australia. She studied philosophy at the University of Essex and worked for many years as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library, London, before becoming a fulltime writer. Her books include
How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and
At the Existentialist Café Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, one of the
New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2016. Bakewell was also among the winners of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize. She still has a tendency to wander but is mostly to be found either in London or in Italy with her wife and their family of dogs and chickens.
