It has been praised in its capacity as a literary self-help book.
How to Live was awarded the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and generally was received well. She also suggests that the empathy readers have historically felt with him "derives partly from the free-style form of the prose as it follows the 'thousand paths' of one man's 'random' reasoning, and partly from the author's confessed inadequacy." Another example of her commentary is that she suggests his unconventional education of only being allowed to speak Latin “benefited him in exactly the areas where it also damaged him,” making him an independent thinker, but also making him detached. For example, she asserts that the idea of writing about oneself was invented by Michel de Montaigne, and that this is one of the reasons his teachings are still relevant today, in particular to the many bloggers who are following his example, knowingly or not, by writing about themselves. It also offers a historical context, explaining Montaigne's time of "soured ideals, when high Renaissance hopes, in Bakewell's words, 'dissolved into violence, cruelty and extremist theology.'" īakewell also provides her own commentary on Montaigne's life and work. In addition to summarizing Montaigne's life and work, How to Live offers an ideological context, discussing the Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, and their cultivation of prosoche (" mindfulness") through ataraxia ("equilibrium," or having control over your emotions). Just as they will to this spirited and singular biography." Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom, and entertainment -and in search of themselves. More than four hundred years later, Montaigne’s honesty and charm still draw people to him.
He wrote free-roaming explorations of his thoughts and experience, unlike anything written before. 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. Contents Īccording to the book's webpage posted by Other Press, How to Live concerns the following: "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. In it, Bakewell "roughly maps out Montaigne's life against the questions he raises along the way," drawing the answers to these questions from his Essays. It is about the life of the 16th-century French nobleman, wine grower, philosopher, and essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne.
How to Live, or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer is a book by Sarah Bakewell, first published by Chatto & Windus in 2010, and by Other Press on September 20, 2011.
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