How to Be

Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

By: Adam Nicolson

Narrated by: Leighton Pugh

In How to Be, Adam Nicolson takes us on a glorious, immersive journey. Grounded in the belief that places give access to minds, however distant and strange, this book reintroduces us to our earliest thinkers through the lands they inhabited.

To know the mental occupations of Homer or Heraclitus, one must visit their cities, sail their seas, and find landscapes not overwhelmed by the millennia that have passed but retain the atmosphere of that ancient life. Nicolson, the award-winning author of Why Homer Matters, uncovers ideas of personhood with Sappho and Alcaeus on Lesbos; plays with paradox in southern Italy with Zeno, the world’s first absurdist; and visits the coastal city of Miletus, burbling with the ideas of Thales and Anaximenes.

Sparkling with maps, photographs, and artwork, How to Be provides a vital new way of understanding the origins of Western thought. It's an expedition into early ideas and a geography of our deepest preconceptions. Nicolson takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and a nexus of cross-cultural connection, and he makes the questions of the ancient world new again. What are the principles of the physical world? How can we be good in it? And why do we continue to ask these questions?

©2023 Adam Nicolson (P)2023 Dreamscape Media

Early Greek Philosophy Grounded in the Geography and Cultural

As a student of philosophy for over fifty years, I found this book by Adam Nicolson engaging, informative, thought-provoking and inspiring. His presentation of the geography, culture, life, character, and teachings of each poet is brilliant. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in a rich presentation of the early Greek philosophers.

Impressed but overwhelmed

Very interesting but overwhelmed by the amount of erudition that went too fast for me to grasp. I would have like more of the information to be explained in an easier way with more relative context. Overall, it has inspired me to learn more about this neglected period of history and thought. We build on other’s concepts and precedents.

Meh

There is a lot more archeology than the sparse amount of life lessons in this book.

Incoherent mess

This book was recommended to me by a friend who had not read it. I was working in Greece and she thought I’d enjoy it.

I now use it to fall asleep, since it works so well. It is utterly incoherent. It is a stream of consciousness, pseudo-intellectual word salad revolving around Ancient Greek myths and literature that might as well be written in Greek. Run on sentences and the most oblique, obscure references plied on top of each other like pastrami on a Rueben at the Carnegie Deli. This book will appeal to only the most Homer- obsessed Greek literature phd candidate. It will explode the brain of any mere mortal. Maybe it’s utter genius. I’ll never know.