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Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope
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56
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
51/100Critics
61/100Scholars
Author:
Sarah Bakewell
Publisher:
Penguin Press
Date:
March 28, 2023
This book explores seven hundred years of writers, thinkers, scientists, and artists, all trying to understand what it means to be truly human.
What The Reviewers Say
A book of big and bold ideas, Humanly Possible is humane in approach and, more important, readable and worth reading, whether you agree with it or not.
[Bakewell] manages to wrangle seven centuries of humanist thought into a brisk narrative, resisting the traps of windy abstraction and glib oversimplification. But covering such enormous terrain means that Humanly Possible doesn’t quite have the bracing focus of her earlier work.
At its core a tenderhearted story about the least tender of experiences: that of refugee children, separated from their parents and extended family, forced to grow up on their own in a foreign country.
Exhilarating.
