Biografía del autor Michael Ignatieff is the author of Isaiah Berlin and The Warrior's Honor, as well as over fifteen other acclaimed books, including a memoir, The Russian Album, and the Booker finalist novel Scar Tissue. He writes regularly for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books. Former head of Canada's Liberal Party, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard's Kennedy School, and president of Central European University, he is currently a professor at CEU in Vienna. Timely and profound philosophical meditations on how great figures in history, literature, music, and art searched for solace while facing tragedies and crises, from the internationally renowned historian of ideas and Booker Prize finalist Michael Ignatieff When we lose someone we love, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes--war, famine, pandemic--we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the therapeutic. How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In a series of lapidary meditations on writers, artists, musicians, and their works--from the books of Job and Psalms to Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, and Primo Levi--esteemed writer and historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity have looked to each other across time to recover hope and resilience. Recreating the moments when great figures found the courage to confront their fate and the determination to continue unafraid, On Consolation takes those stories into the present, movingly contending that we can revive these traditions of consolation to meet the anguish and uncertainties of our precarious twenty-first century. An ambitious restoration project . . . Ignatieff believes that holy texts of all denominations can be mined for comfort and insight even by the faithless, in their depiction of common human experience.--The New York Times Book Review When the world is in crisis, where should we look for comfort? . . . On Consolation is a meditation on the nature of comfort, explored via a series of portraits of artists, writers and thinkers who have stood on the precipice of despair and sought consolation in difficult times . . . Ignatieff's aim in telling these stories is to remind us that we are not the first generation to encounter despair and to search for pathways through it.--The GuardianTo be a member of the human race is to undergo loss, anguish, bereavement, betrayal, failure, aloneness, and the fear of death . . . To be human is also, in some cases, to possess extraordinary courage, endurance, intellectual power, imagination, and capacity for hope . . .Michael Ignatieff's remarkable and moving new book, written out of the dark times of a world pandemic . . . suggests what we might learn from individual examples of 'the human experience.'--Hermione Lee, The New York Review of BooksRich and nuanced . . . Ignatieff's portraits . . . are also touched by a sense of urgency, stirred by personal events in Ignatieff's life and public events that have swept across all our lives . . . Consolation is so terribly important. Perhaps now more than ever. In this regard, Ignatieff has done us a great service with this moving and affecting series of reflections.--Robert Zaretsky, The Los Angeles Review of BooksAs religious belief declines, and in a culture obsessed with success, how do we find consolation? Michael Ignatieff looks to thinkers, who came through the darkest experiences, for what they can tell us about holding on to hope and belief in life's possibilities . . . Ignatieff argues, in this deeply important bo
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- Editorial: Vintage
- Autor: Ignatieff, Professor Michael
