About this item
Winner of the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for BiographyHow 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. They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honorable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy?This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Monatigne, perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them “essays,” meaning “attempts” or “tries.” Into them, he put whatever was in his head: 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.
About the Author
Sarah Bakewell was born in Bournemouth on the English south coast in 1963, but spent most of her childhood in Sydney, Australia, after several years travelling the hippy trail through Asia with her parents. Returning to Britain, she studied philosophy at the University of Essex and worked as a curator of early printed books at London's Wellcome Library for ten years before devoting herself to full-time writing in 2002. After a few years living in the Italian countryside, she has returned to urban life in London, where she teaches creative writing at City University, London, and for the Open University.Her three books are all biographies, but the latest, 'How to Live: a life of Montaigne', is also an exploration of philosophical questions, not least the one posed by its title: How does one live well?
