My Next Book: The Philosopher’s Tome
It’s a been a good year of publishing for me.
Academically, my colleagues and I successfully launched our edited collection of essays, Pandemics, Public Health, and the Regulation of Borders: Lessons from COVID-19:
I’m presently working on the chapter on “Immunity and Infection” for the upcoming 5th edition of Core Concepts in Health:
And under my own imprint, Intanjible Publishing, I put out two Amazon Canada #1 bestsellers this year. First was my collection of old South Asian village stories called Folktales of Ancient India:
Second was my updated textbook, International Health: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, 3rd Edition, also surprisingly a multiple time Amazon Canada #1 bestseller:
My newest book is just about ready for public release. But as part of the launch process, I’m offering a PDF version *FREE* to some early readers in hopes that they will consider writing a review for Amazon.
It’s called The Philosopher’s Tome and is a collection of 103 quotes from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, with explanations of how those nuggets of wisdom are still relevant in today’s increasingly rudderless modern life. They aren’t necessarily the most famous quotes or the ones for which those men (and yes, sadly, they are all men) are best known. Rather, they are the quotes that I have found most useful in my own life.
My intent is to share with others the wisdom of the ancients, at least to the extent that it might be helpful in their lives. I was inspired to do this by two things. First, watching as generation after generation of my own students sink deeper in subclinical mental illness in the form of insecurities and anxieties, convinced me that somehow our society has been rapidly leeched of the daily wisdom that used to permeate our every interaction. Simple but powerful aphorisms like, “Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me,” have disappeared, to be inexplicably replaced with, “Words are literal violence.”
Second, my own experience on social media during the worst of the pandemic, forced me to retreat to philosophical teachings. When I was on TV a lot, many people (i.e., idiots) decided that if they couldn’t blame the government for the bad things in their life, they would instead blame the face on their screen. So I got daily insults and threats, even calls to my employer demanding that I be fired. It got so bad that if I was recognized on the street (as was happening on an almost daily basis), I’d have to scoop up my child and rush home; I could not know if this person was being friendly or meant my family harm.
All of this was happening while I, too, was struggling under the weight of pandemic and lockdowns, while I was a brand new father, and while I was dealing with deaths and impending deaths in my own family. The stresses were enormous and I was losing so much weight from it all that I had to undergo some pretty invasive medical investigations to rule out more insidious factors.
I eventually found my path out of that abyss by rediscovering ancient teachings. For me, it was the writings of ancient Indian philosophers and the words of the Greek Cynics and Stoics and limitedly the Epicureans. I immediately started incorporating some of those teachings into my own graduate classes, especially now that my students were eager to learn about the public engagement side of what I do.
So, with this volume, my goal is to remind the world that such teachings exist, that they are in fact increasingly relevant to our accelerating and chaotic world, and that they are eminently accessible and not the domain of scholars and eggheads. Quite the contrary, in fact: ancient wisdom was meant for everyone.
I’m offering a *FREE* pdf version to the first 25 people who enter the email address in the link below. I only ask that you consider leaving a review on Amazon once you’ve sampled the book:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YCRV2P6