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"Elegant, humane, and intensely rewarding." --Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Lies That Bind
"At once, illuminating, moving and consoling." --Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve
From the internationally renowned historian of ideas and Booker Prize-finalist Michael Ignatieff, a timely and profound meditation on where to find solace in the face of tragedy and crisis.
When someone we love dies, 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, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross 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 brings 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.
About this Author
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF is the author of Isaiah Berlin and The Warrior's Honour, as well as sixteen other acclaimed books, including a memoir, The Russian Album and the Booker finalist Scar Tissue. He writes regularly for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, and has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including Fresh Air and Fareed Zakariah GPS. Former head of Canada's Liberal Party and director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard's Kennedy School, he served as the rector and president of Central European University until 2021, when he stepped down to become a professor of history at the university in Vienna.
Reviews
"In an age when we are so much in need of solace, Michael Ignatieff went looking for it in texts and times whose assumptions are profoundly different from our own. The result is a secular reinterpretation of a landscape that has often seemed visible only through a religious lens: it is elegant, humane and intensely rewarding." --Kwame Anthony Appiah, philosopher and novelist
"On Consolation is an ambitious restoration project, a survey course of Eurocentric anguish from Job to the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz . . . Ignatieff believes that holy texts of all denominations can be mined for comfort and insight even by the faithless, [in] their depiction, over frequent revisions, of common human experience. Maybe, against Sartre, heaven is other people." --The New York Times Book Review
"This erudite and heartfelt survey reminds us that the need for consolation is timeless, as are the inspiring words and examples of those who walked this path before us." --Toronto Star
"On Consolation could not be more urgent. . . . Ignatieff wants to re-acquaint us moderns with the old ways we've left behind, and to remind us that some problems are, by their nature, beyond the powers of technology and good government." --Ash Carter, Air Mail
"A wonderful balance of literary survey and personal reflection, this book is wide-ranging, moving, and stylishly written. It makes the perfect introduction to a genre that never goes out of fashion." --Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Café
"Michael Ignatieff's moving book explores how consolation has been configured in different eras and suggests what we might learn from individual examples of 'the human experience." --The New York Review of Books
"An artful storyteller, Ignatieff takes us on a whistle-stop tour through the lives of a nice selection of western philosophers and public intellectuals . . . [T]houghtful reflections on the limits of philosophy in the rough and tumble of life." --Reaction (UK)
"An inspiration for those in need of words to carry on with life." --Kirkus Reviews
"A passionate, thought-provoking, unpredictable book." --Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg
"This is an extraordinarily moving book. The idea of solidarity in time is itself consoling, amidst so much loss: in Ignatieff's words, 'we are not alone, and we never have been.'" --Emma Rothschild, Harvard University
"An extraordinary meditation on loss and mortality, drawing on all of Michael Ignatieff's powers as a philosopher, a historian, a politician and a man. His portraits of figures such as Hume and Montaigne are sharp and dignified, troubling and consoling, thoughtful and deeply humane." --Rory Stewart, author, explorer, diplomat, former politician and academic
"Illuminating and moving, these wide-ranging portraits of men and women seeking answers in dark times--from the Book of Job to Montaigne, from Cicero to Akhmatova, and on to today's palliative care--appeals to us all, as a universal quest and an intimate personal testament." --Jenny Uglow, historian and biographer
"It is at once illuminating, moving and consoling, to follow Michael Ignatieff as he searches for moments of consolation across the centuries. With resolute honesty, Ignatieff follows the search into his own inner life, grappling, as we all must do, with failure, loss, and death." --Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
"On Consolation offers a powerful message for a world that can seem bereft of meaning . . . Whether we look for a path back to where we were before the pandemic, or directions to someplace new, we can do so the way Ignatieff's subjects did: through work, through pleasure, through music and literature. That is our universality. There is consolation to be found everywhere, because, with the wind of history at our backs, we are never truly alone." --Literary Review of Canada
"Compelling." --Maclean's
"With On Consolation, Michael Ignatieff, Canada's great intellectual powerhouse, gifts us with deeply perceptive insights on eternal truths, seen through a contemporary lens, which lead us toward a desperately needed restoration of communal hope." --Lieutenant-General (ret) The Honourable Roméo Dallaire
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