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A review by jdintr
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer by Sarah Bakewell
3.0
How to live. It's an intriguing question--one which led me to this book, despite a rather shallow background of reading in philosophy or early European writers.
Montaigne's life emerges from the pages as one that was worth examining (and how many 16th-century personages could we say that about?). His essays explore distinct personal challenges: a near brush with death, the consciousness of the cat in his room, matters of sexuality and attractiveness. What Bakewell adds is the external challenges--plague, religious wars, a perilous political situation--that shaped the man. People of Montaigne's day would have honored him for reasons which are lost to modern readers.
Montaigne's life emerges from the pages as one that was worth examining (and how many 16th-century personages could we say that about?). His essays explore distinct personal challenges: a near brush with death, the consciousness of the cat in his room, matters of sexuality and attractiveness. What Bakewell adds is the external challenges--plague, religious wars, a perilous political situation--that shaped the man. People of Montaigne's day would have honored him for reasons which are lost to modern readers.