Adam Nicolson's 2023 Book How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks, and Walter J. Ong's Thought

Abstract

In my deeply retrospective 4,215-word review essay "Adam Nicolson's 2023 Book How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks, and Walter J. Ong's Thought," I selectively highlight the prolific English author Adam Nicolson's 2023 book How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). I situate his work in the larger conceptual framework of the work of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) -- and the extensive related work of numerous other scholars, including the philosopher Eric Voegelin and the classicist Eric A. Havelock.