Sarah Bakewell
How to Live
Sarah Bakewell follows Michel de Montaigne as he tests one question—how to live—through death, friendship, reading, skepticism, travel, public duty, and the ordinary compromises of embodied life. Its intellectual and practical value lies in showing how attention, independence, sociability, and moderation can become ways of remaining human amid uncertainty.
9 chapters
Humanly Possible
Sarah Bakewell traces seven centuries of humanist thought through a central question: how can people build ethical lives and shared meaning without relying on a single creed or imagining humanity as perfect? Examples of textual recovery, education, scientific inquiry, political exclusion, catastrophe, and everyday care show humanism as a revisable practice of connection, criticism, and responsibility.
13 chapters