**Nicolson crafts a geography of the ancient world and a brilliant
exploration of our connections to the past.
**
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?
"A thing of beauty as well as wit and wisdom." --Paul Cartledge, author
of Thebes: The Forgotten City
