Humanly Possible
Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope
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Narrated by:
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Antonia Beamish
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By:
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Sarah Bakewell
About this listen
The New York Times bestseller • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023 • A New York Times Notable Book
“A book of big and bold ideas, Humanly Possible is humane in approach and, more important, readable and worth reading. . . Bakewell is wide-ranging, witty and compassionate.”–Wall Street Journal
“Sweeping . . . linking philosophical reflections with vibrant anecdotes.”—The New York Times
The bestselling author of How to Live and At the Existentialist Café explores seven hundred years of writers, thinkers, scientists, and artists, all seeking to understand what it means to be truly human
Humanism is an expansive tradition of thought that places shared humanity, cultural vibrancy, and moral responsibility at the center of our lives. For centuries, this worldview has inspired people to make their choices by principles of freethinking, intellectual inquiry, fellow feeling, and optimism. In this sweeping new history, Sarah Bakewell, herself a lifelong humanist, illuminates the very personal, individual, and, well, human matter of humanism and takes listeners on a grand intellectual adventure.
Voyaging from the literary enthusiasts of the fourteenth century to the secular campaigners of our own time, from Voltaire to Zora Neale Hurston, Bakewell brings together extraordinary humanists across history. She explores their immense variety: some sought to promote scientific and rationalist ideas, others put more emphasis on moral living, and still others were concerned with the cultural and literary studies known as “the humanities.” Humanly Possible asks not only what unites all these meanings of humanism but why it has such enduring power, despite opposition from fanatics, mystics, and tyrants. A singular examination of this vital tradition as well as a dazzling contribution to its literature, Humanly Possible serves as a recentering, a call to care for one another, and a reminder that we are all, together, only human.
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Critic reviews
“A book of big and bold ideas, Humanly Possible is humane in approach and, more important, readable and worth reading . . . Bakewell is wide-ranging, witty and compassionate.”—The Wall Street Journal
“NBCC Award winner Bakewell (How to Live) brilliantly tracks the development of humanism over seven centuries of intellectual history . . . Erudite and accessible, Bakewell’s survey pulls together diverse historical threads without sacrificing the up-close details that give this work its spark. Even those who already consider themselves humanists will be enlightened.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Engagingly written as well as richly informative . . . every thinker, every book, every movement is located lightly and precisely in relation to its past and its influence on the present day. I can’t imagine a better history of humanism, nor one that is so vividly persuasive. Bakewell is a wonderful writer.”—Philip Pullman
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Time of the Magicians
- Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy
- By: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside
- Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living hand to mouth as a critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, in search of spiritual clarity.
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Narrator butchers foreign many language quotations
- By William G. Brown on 08-31-20
By: Wolfram Eilenberger, and others
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The Art of the Novel
- By: Milan Kundera, Linda Asher - translator
- Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm
- Length: 4 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Kundera brilliantly examines the work of such important and diverse figures as Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Musil. He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe. Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the postpsychological novel.
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Informative and Inspiring
- By Mo on 11-27-21
By: Milan Kundera, and others
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Seven Types of Atheism
- By: John Gray
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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For a generation now, public debate has been corroded by a shrill, narrow derision of religion in the name of an often vaguely understood “science.” John Gray’s stimulating and enjoyable new book, Seven Types of Atheism, describes the complex, dynamic world of older atheisms, a tradition that is, he writes, in many ways intertwined with and as rich as religion itself.
By: John Gray
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A Wicked Company
- The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment
- By: Philipp Blom
- Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin
- Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The flourishing of radical philosophy in Baron Thierry Holbach’s Paris salon from the 1750s to the 1770s stands as a seminal event in Western history. Holbach’s house was an international epicenter of revolutionary ideas and intellectual daring, bringing together such original minds as Denis Diderot, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, Ferdinando Galiani, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, Guillaume Raynal, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In A Wicked Company, acclaimed historian Philipp Blom retraces the fortunes of this exceptional group of friends.
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Excellent Book on Radical Enlightenment
- By EJJ on 02-15-15
By: Philipp Blom
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Rescuing Socrates
- How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation
- By: Roosevelt Montás
- Narrated by: Roosevelt Montás
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities.
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Excellent defense of a crucial part of education
- By Nom de Guerre on 01-24-22
By: Roosevelt Montás
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What Are We Doing Here?
- By: Marilynne Robinson
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Marilynne Robinson has plumbed the human spirit in her renowned novels, including Lila and Gilead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In this new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern political climate and the mysteries of faith. Whether she is investigating how the work of great thinkers about America, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Alexis de Tocqueville, inform our political consciousness or discussing how beauty informs and disciplines daily life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on full display.
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Unpersuasive and a bit repetitive
- By Adam Shields on 03-07-18
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Angels and Ages
- A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life
- By: Adam Gopnik
- Narrated by: Adam Gopnik
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Written 200 years after Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln shared a birthday on February 12, 1809, this insightful account sheds new light on two men who changed the way we think about the meaning of life and death. Award-winning journalist Adam Gopnik's unique perspective, combined with previously unexplored stories and figures, reveals two men planted firmly at the roots of modern views and liberal values.
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Connecting Darwin and Lincoln
- By Joshua Kim on 06-10-12
By: Adam Gopnik
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How to Save the West
- Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises
- By: Spencer Klavan
- Narrated by: Spencer Klavan
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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It has been proclaimed many times, but perhaps never more convincingly than now, when every news cycle seems to deliver further confirmation of a world gone mad. Is this the endgame? Author Spencer Klavan is a classicist, with a Ph.D. from Oxford, and a deep understanding of the West. His analysis: The situation is dire. But every crisis we face today, we have faced before. And we can surmount each one. Klavan brings to the West’s defense the insights of Plato, Aristotle, the Bible, and the Founding Fathers to show that in the wisdom of the past lies hope for the future.
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Spectacular! A must read!
- By M.A. on 02-15-23
By: Spencer Klavan
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The Story of Philosophy
- The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers
- By: Will Durant
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 19 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Durant lucidly describes the philosophical systems of such world-famous “monarchs of the mind” as Plato, Aristotle, Francis Bacon, Spinoza, Kant, Voltaire, and Nietzsche. Along with their ideas, he offers their flesh-and-blood biographies, placing their thoughts within their own time and place and elucidating their influence on our modern intellectual heritage. This book is packed with wisdom and wit.
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Fantastic and insightful book
- By ESK on 01-25-13
By: Will Durant
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Why We Are Restless
- On the Modern Quest for Contentment
- By: Benjamin Storey, Jenna Silber Storey
- Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, yet everywhere we see signs that our pursuit of happiness has proven fruitless. Dissatisfied, we seek change for the sake of change - even if it means undermining the foundations of our common life. In Why We Are Restless, Benjamin and Jenna Storey offer a profound and beautiful reflection on the roots of this malaise and examine how we might begin to cure ourselves.
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Good primer.
- By Chris on 09-29-21
By: Benjamin Storey, and others
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Irrationality
- A History of the Dark Side of Reason
- By: Justin E. H. Smith
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal”. But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today - from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump - Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.
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A good brain workout
- By ThomasC on 04-09-19
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Emerson
- The Mind on Fire
- By: Robert D. Richardson
- Narrated by: Michael McConnohie
- Length: 26 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord.
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Finally!
- By Douglas on 08-15-14
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The Mind That Is Catholic
- Philosophical and Political Essays
- By: James V. Schall
- Narrated by: Tim Lundeen
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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James V. Schall is a treasure of the Catholic intellectual tradition. A prolific author and essayist, Schall readily connects with his readers on sundry topics from war to friendship, philosophy, politics, and to ordinary everyday living. In his newest work, The Mind That Is Catholic, he presents a retrospective collection of his academic and literary essays written in the past 50 years.
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Profound Insights
- By Considerable on 10-17-14
By: James V. Schall
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A Terribly Serious Adventure
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These were among the questions that philosophers wrestled with in mid-twentieth-century Britain, a period shadowed by war and the rise of fascism. In response to these events, thinkers such as Philippa Foot (originator of the famous trolley problem), Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Gilbert Ryle, and J. L. Austin aspired to a new level of watchfulness and self-awareness about language as a way of keeping philosophy true to everyday experience.
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The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history’s greatest philosophers. There were four women, in particular, whose parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century—at once in necessary dialogue and in striking contrast with one another.
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Satire and Beauvoir’s problematic behavior; Simone Weil’s problematic self-immolation
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“There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature.” Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book. Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles.
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Paradoxical Evolutionary Psychology?
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Magnificent Rebels
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When did we begin to be as self-centered as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we first ask the question, how can I be free? It all began in the 1790s in a quiet university town in Germany when a group of playwrights, poets, and writers put the self at center stage in their thinking, writing, and their lives.
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fascinating overall, too much drama
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Foreign Bodies
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Cities and countries engulfed by panic and death, desperate for vaccines but fearful of what inoculation may bring. This is what the world has just gone through with Covid-19. But as Simon Schama shows in his epic history of vulnerable humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science, it has happened before.
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Great Disappointment
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Around the World in 80 Books
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Inspired by Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard University’s department of comparative literature and founder of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic’s restrictions on travel by exploring 80 exceptional books from around the globe.
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Ruined by writer narrating
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A History of Western Philosophy
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Considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of all time, the History of Western Philosophy is a dazzlingly unique exploration of the ideologies of significant philosophers throughout the ages - from Plato and Aristotle through to Spinoza, Kant and the 20th century. Written by a man who changed the history of philosophy himself, this is an account that has never been rivaled since its first publication over 60 years ago.
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Russell's Philosophy, Some History Included
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By: Bertrand Russell
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Philosopher of the Heart
- The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard
- By: Clare Carlisle
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Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence - how to be a human being in the world? - while exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him.
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Fatally flawed
- By Citizen M on 02-26-23
By: Clare Carlisle
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The Maniac
- By: Benjamin Labatut
- Narrated by: Gergo Danka, Eva Magyar
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- Unabridged
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Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World electrified a global readership. A Booker Prize and National Book Award finalist, and one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year, it explored the life and thought of a clutch of mathematicians and physicists who took science to strange and sometimes dangerous new realms. In The MANIAC, Labatut has created a tour de force on an even grander scale.
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Gergo Danka and Eva Magyar are excellent narrators
- By Barbara S on 11-04-23
By: Benjamin Labatut
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The Half Known Life
- In Search of Paradise
- By: Pico Iyer
- Narrated by: Pico Iyer
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Traveling from Iran to North Korea, from the Dalai Lama’s Himalayas to the ghostly temples of Japan, Pico Iyer brings together a lifetime of explorations to upend our ideas of utopia and ask how we might find peace in the midst of difficulty and suffering. Does religion lead us back to Eden or only into constant contention? Why do so many seeming paradises turn into warzones? And does paradise exist only in the afterworld – or can it be found in the here and now?
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Would enjoy Meeting Pico and having a deep Conversation while having some good tea.
- By M. on 02-13-23
By: Pico Iyer
What listeners say about Humanly Possible
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- RAY MONTECALVO
- 04-14-23
A glimmer of hope
This is a masterfully written history of humanist thought and the humans who developed it from the Greeks to the present day. Antonia Beamish narrates the text with subtle grandeur, with measures of awe and splendor that will leave you feeling that there definitely IS a better way to live than how we’re doing it now!
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4 people found this helpful
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- Gloria Crowe
- 05-20-23
well worth a credit
I found this book to be a good, well researched, overview of humanism containing many interesting facts and anecdotes.
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- Chromo Domo
- 04-03-24
No Magical Thinking
So many great names speak to us across the ages. The Epilogue of humanity has not yet been written.
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- Lydia
- 08-13-23
MAGNIFICENT
one book I am entirely compelled to purchase in hard copy. a truly magnificent work.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Michael C. Miller MD
- 07-10-23
Wonderful
Extremely well written, well argued, and well read by the narrator. Learned a lot and was convinced!
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- TFH
- 05-23-23
Inspiring
So well stated. Beautifully read. Inspiring. Requires 15 words. One two three four five six seven
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- Julie
- 04-16-23
Terrific
The always excellent Sarah Bakewell gives us a great book that is accessible and important, imo, in these days.
I plan to listen again, very well done as we’d expect from this exceptional writer.
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- randy cathcart
- 08-04-23
approachable and informative
I couldn't keep up with all the names and dates as well as I would have liked, but I learned a lot, and I appreciated that the author humanized the humanists rather than just present them dryly. Also, the narrator did a fantastic job.
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- Bill. Thirdson
- 05-14-23
Worthy, great study
Should be taught in every senior high school and college humanities curriculum. outstanding survey of humanism and superb narration.
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-27-23
Humanity's last best hope
This excellent historical journey is one I wish all human beings would consider taking especially in these dark days of increasing fascism, nationalism, religious extremism, racism, political posturing and pandering. Sarah Bakewell offers an antidote and antivenom to all that poison, one readily available to any and all human beings. She takes you through this remarkable collection of fellow travellers on the human journey. She is a masterful storyteller.
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