How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.92 (618 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B005ACDYX8 |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 541 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-02-19 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
The Essays was an instant best seller and, over four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw readers to him. It traces his bizarre upbringing, his youthful career and sexual adventures, his travels, and his friendships with the scholar and poet Étienne de La Boétie and with his adopted "daughter," Marie de Gournay. They come in search of companionship, wisdom, and entertainment - and in search of themselves.This book, a spirited and singular biography, relates the story of Montaigne's life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. And we also meet his readers - who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, "How to live?". He called them essays, meaning "attempts" or "tries." He put whatever was in his head into them: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. A nobleman, public official, and winegrower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. National Book Critics Circle Award, Biography, 2011This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, perhaps the first recog
An Alexandria music lover said How to ENJOY Your Intellectual Life: Read this book. Sarah Bakewell is a genius. In this book she gives us a moving biography of Montaigne, a history of the genesis and contents of his marvelous essays, an introduction to the history of editing his great masterpiece, and a lively and fascinating narrative of informed and popular responses to his book in successive eras. Montaigne very much feels like real presence in this book, one with a distinctive personality that is vividly represented by the author. One feels that Bakewell, along with hundreds or thousands of earlier reader. A Fine Biography of a Very Important Writer Richard B. Schwartz Sarah Bakewell’s biography of Montaigne won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography in 2010. It is a fine book, one that will engage the attention of all readers interested in the subject. That subject, of course, is very wide-ranging. Inspired by the philosophers of antiquity, Montaigne is one of the principal French writers of the Renaissance. To a degree he created the ‘essay’ form and his work has been pivotal for later thinkers. John Florio’s English translation was taught—in my . French onion soup for the soul This remarkable book is the perfect primer on the most noble everyman soul-searcher Michael de Montaigne. Ms. Bakewell honors her own love of the16th-century founder of the personal essay by giving readers a carefully rendered, diligently sourced guided tour of Montaigne's timeless accounting of his own heart and soul. How To Live is mostly about just how to be in life and in the world. It loses nothing in translation nor across the passing of 500 years since Montaigne wrote his famous collection of essays With war and plague