In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility - Softcover

Bradatan, Costica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674297202 ISBN 13: 9780674297203

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2024

Synopsis

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

“Charming and brilliant.” ―Times Literary Supplement

“Provocative, stimulating, wise―the book that our success-obsessed age needs to read.”―Tom Holland

“Bradatan, a philosopher, writes with elegance and wit, his every thought and sentence slipping smoothly into the next…I was absorbed by Bradatan’s book even―or especially―when I felt uncomfortable with its implications.” ―Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

“Bradatan wears his erudition lightly. He is a pleasure to read, and his prose conveys a happy resilience in the face of life’s inevitable contradictions. His lessons in humility remind us that the pursuit of success is often motivated by the dread of failure―and that our attempts to create things are often driven by an avoidance of our mortality.” ―Michael S. Roth, Washington Post

“Bradatan writes with the same daring, the same interpretive anger that made his subjects notorious in their own day for choosing failure over what their respective worlds counted as success. A gripping read, start to finish.” ―Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography

Our obsession with success is hard to overlook. Everywhere we compete, rank, and measure. Yet this relentless drive to be the best blinds us to something vitally important: the need to be humble in the face of life’s challenges.

In Praise of Failure explores several arenas of failure, from the social and political to the spiritual and biological. Gleefully breaching the boundaries between argument and storytelling, scholarship and spiritual quest, Costica Bradatan mounts his case for failure through the stories of four historical figures who led lives of impact and meaning and assiduously courted failure. Their struggles show that engaging with our limitations can be not just therapeutic but positively transformative.

About this title

About the Author

Costica Bradatan is author of Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers and coeditor of The God Beat. A contributor to the New York Times, Aeon, Commonweal, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New Statesman and Religion/Philosophy Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, he is Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University and Honorary Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland in Australia. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• ISBN 10: 0674297202
• ISBN 13: 9780674297203
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288