(Knopf, $35)
“Despite his insistence on the examined life,” Socrates has never been a figure the rest of us have known well, said Walter Isaacson in The New York Times. Western philosophy’s first great thinker never wrote anything, so our knowledge of him comes mostly from two acolytes and a parodist—“each of whom had his own agenda.” Though “academic purists may chafe” at the “imaginative leaps” historian Bettany Hughes makes in order to help us see the man himself, she’s thoroughly succeeded in her ambition. By the end of her 500-page book, “we can almost see and smell the man, with all of his quirks and foibles and questioning brilliance.”
Hughes’s Socrates is “a towering yet intensely human figure,” said Steve Donoghue in The Washington Post. Born in 469 B.C., he was a soldier into his 40s, serving Athens valiantly in the Peloponnesian War before creating a life built around ideas. Hanging out in Athens’s agora, or marketplace, he fashioned himself as a teacher and dedicated his life to the search for “the good.” His insistence, as we might say, that “the enemy is always within” must have been “extremely annoying” to his fellow Athenians at a time when their rivals from Sparta were burning down warehouses and otherwise terrorizing the very market Socrates haunted. Hughes is at her best helping us understand why this pest eventually would be sentenced to death for supposedly corrupting the city’s youth and “inventing false gods.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Hughes’s Athens isn’t at all the “fair, ordered society” we tend to conjure in our imaginations, said Troy Jollimore in BarnesandNobleReview.com. The city Socrates lived and died for was instead a place where “political coups, internecine strife, and pointless foreign wars” were common. Socrates’ trial, in which a jury of 500 fellow citizens listened to evidence and then sentenced him to die “for what were essentially thought crimes,” remains a black stain on the history of democracy. It isn’t a story we like hearing, but we’re lucky Hughes has restaged it in such a
“satisfyingly vivid” new way.
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”