Reviews

A nice introduction to Stoicism, hitting all the familiar historical, cultural, Social details. There's a glaring missed opportunity to turn this into a work book: 55 stoic exercises form the bulk of the book in the 2nd part, but many seem quite similar to another. I wonder if Salzgeber couldn't have reduced them to 52, then you've got a Stoic Practice for the Week, which turns the book from a 'nice to read, but not keep', to instant keeper.

A couple of other issues. Salzgeber does repeat himself quite a bit, maybe to labour the point, but I wouldn't say his style of writing flows particularly well, so it becomes more noticeable. Another missed opportunity to try and find some real life examples of stocism with actually life-altering problems. He talks about accidentally stepping in dog crap as a trigger to some people who fly into a rage. I honestly envy those people's problems. Now what do you do when you're assaulted by a random individual when you're minding your business jogging? Salzgeber almost gets there. Almost. We can't control things that aren't ours to control. Ok, hard to shrug off a random beating, but ok. People who do wrong only do so because they believe they're doing right, so we should pity them and not let them dwell on our minds. Almost.

We don't even get many serious issues from the ancient sources. It seems assumed that the most powerful man in the world at the time, Marcus Aurelius, had a difficult life day in day out. He says to be kind to people. We well kind-ed the crap out the tribes of Germania, didn't he? Marcus must have thought he was right to do so, but how can we square that with our modern post-colonial mindsets? We already have the words of the stoics, what would be nice is an educated modern assessment.

There's a lot of good stuff here, but it feels like a skipping stone on the waters of Stoicism. Only briefly touching elements here and there. And Frankly I'm not sure I got more out of this than John Sellar's (much shorter and to the point) Lessons in Stoicism.

kitty_kat21's review against another edition

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4.0

A great succinct look at Stoicism for a philosophy novice. I enjoyed every minute reading this book, and I find the principles make great sense and are practical to build mental resilience. Recommend.