HOW TO LIVE Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

Davina Porter is a standout here. If you know almost nothing about Montaigne, the great sixteenth-century French “father of the essay,” that’s only one reason to listen to this superb match of narrator, biographer, and subject. Author Sarah Bakewell focuses on the question she considers central to Montaigne’s writing: How to live? Her “one question and twenty attempts at an answer” is a focused, lively, highly engaging reconstruction of Montaigne’s life and times, which Davina Porter delivers with wonderful flair and sensitivity. Anyone who has read Montaigne, or Bakewell’s highly praised book—which for many of today’s readers has “reinvented” Montaigne—will love this rendering, in which narrator Porter reinvents him once again. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine [Published: MARCH 2013]