Nicolson crafts a geography of the ancient world and a brilliant exploration of our connections to the past.
In “How to Be”, Adam Nicolson takes us on a glorious, immersive journey. Grounded in the belief that places give access to minds, however distant and strange, this book reintroduces us to our earliest thinkers through the lands they inhabited. To know the mental occupations of Homer or Heraclitus, one must visit their cities, sail their seas, and find landscapes not overwhelmed by the millennia that have passed but retain the atmosphere of that ancient life. Nicolson, the award-winning author of “Why Homer Matters”, uncovers ideas of personhood with Sappho and Alcaeus on Lesbos; plays with paradox in southern Italy with Zeno, the world's first absurdist; and visits the coastal city of Miletus, burbling with the ideas of Thales and Anaximenes.
Sparkling with maps, photographs, and artwork, “How to Be” provides a vital new way of understanding the origins of Western thought. It's an expedition into early ideas and a geography of our deepest preconceptions. Nicolson takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and a nexus of cross-cultural connection, and he makes the questions of the ancient world 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?
"Wise, elegant . . . richer and more unusual than [the self-help genre], an exploration of the origins of Western subjectivity."
Dennis Duncan, The Washington Post
"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."
The New Yorker
"I'm not sure I've ever read a book that marries such profundity with such a mischievous sense of fun . . . [How to Be] is like a net strung between the deep past and the present, a blueprint for a life well lived."
