Review & Discuss Part 1: "Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Freethinking"

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Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

"In this sweeping new history, author Sarah Bakewell illuminates the very personal, individual, and human matter of humanism and takes readers on a grand intellectual adventure.

"From literary enthusiasts of the fourteenth century to the secular campaigners of our own time, from Erasmus to Esperanto, from anatomists to agnostics, from Christine de Pizan to Bertrand Russell, and from Voltaire to Zora Neale Hurston, Bakewell brings together extraordinary humanists across history.

Humanly Possible asks not only what brings all these aspects of humanism together but why it has such enduring power, despite opposition from fanatics, mystics, and tyrants."

NOTE:
In fairness to everyone attending who expects to have a meaningful discussion and a productive learning experience, you must have read through one half of this book (roughly 200 pages) in order to attend this meeting.

NOTE:
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Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope
March 2023
by Sarah Blackwell
~414 pages plus endnotes
audio 14:27
Penguin Press

https://www.amazon.com/Humanly-Possible-Hundred-Humanist-Freethinking/dp/0735223378/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0

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About the Author
Sarah Bakewell had a wandering childhood, growing up on the “hippie trail” through Asia and in Australia. She studied philosophy at the University of Essex and worked for many years as a curator of early printed books at the Wellcome Library, London, before becoming a full-time writer. Her books include How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, which won the Duff Cooper Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, one of the New York Times’ Ten Best Books of 2016.

Book Reviews

New York Times, March 29, 2023:
The Tricky Thing With Humanism, This Book Implies, Is Humans

“Lively. . . [Bakewell’s] new book is filled with her characteristic wit and clarity; she manages to wrangle seven centuries of humanist thought into a brisk narrative, resisting the traps of windy abstraction and glib oversimplification. . . She puts her entire self into this book, linking philosophical reflections with vibrant anecdotes. She delights in the paradoxical and the particular, reminding us that every human being contains multitudes.”
—Jennifer Szalai, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/29/books/review/humanly-possible-sarah-bakewell.html

“A book of big and bold ideas, Humanly Possible is humane in approach and, more important, readable and worth reading . . . Bakewell is wide-ranging, witty and compassionate.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“Bakewell exemplifies the thirst for life and learning of humanism at its best.”
—Literary Review