How to Live

How to Live

By Sarah Bakewell

Pages

400

Rating

4.02

Year

2010

EssaysPhilosophyHistoryBiographyBiography MemoirFrance

Description

How to get on well with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love? How to live? This question obsessed Renaissance nobleman Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–92), who wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. Into these essays he put his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when it was dreaming, and events in the appalling civil wars raging around him. Over four hundred years later, readers still come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment, and in search of themselves. This first full biography of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored.