This is my last book on Stoicism, which came out last year. Its got sixteen reviews on Amazon now and it looks like people are finding it helpful. (I make about 27p in royalties for every copy sold so I reckon if I give it another plug that should raise enough money for a cappuccino tomorrow.) Anyway, I was invited to write it as part of Hodders Teach Yourself series, which meant sticking to a fairly strict self-help format, with lots of bullet points, examples, and exercises in separate boxes, etc. Its not my normal style of writing but I kind of enjoyed the challenge. I wanted to write something that non-academics would find readable, and contained lots of concrete practical exercises, but that was also very accurate as a representation of ancient Stoicism. I also wanted to avoid going over familiar ground so I drew on a broader range of literature than Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, and tried to include as many references to the early Stoics as possible, and other sources such as Cicero and Lucan, as well as references to the precursors of Stoicism, like Socrates, Xenophon, and the Cynics. So there you go, I just thought Id say a bit about the background. I really wish someone would do a Teach Yourself Epicureanism as well. That would be pretty cool and I think it would work well in this format.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 22:48:45 +0000
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