Socrates: A Life Worth Living [Paperback]

A lively and accessible introduction to the quintessential philosopher, and the civilized world’s first enemy of the state.

Named a Best Teen & YA Nonfiction title of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews

Socrates: A Life Worth Living traces the life and ideas of one of Western Civilization’s founding philosophers, whose influence is still felt more than two thousand years later. Socrates is famous for how he died, executed by the Athenian government for corrupting the youth of Athens, but his most important contribution was to challenge the people around him to test their ideas and beliefs in conversation with each other, in the belief that in this way we could become a society that knows the difference between truth and falsehood, and find what makes a life worthwhile. He did not claim to have definitive answers, but he knew that knowledge was the key to finding them, and he invited everyone he met to join him in his quest. 
 
The Socratic Method is the first, and still the best, method for distinguishing truth from falsehood. In Socrates: A Life Worth Living, award-winning author Devra Lehmann gives us the first biography for young readers of the thinker who has seen no equal. What a welcome book! Socrates—relentless in the pursuit of truth, champion of the Socratic method, fearless prisoner of conscience—went willingly to his death upon the verdict of an Athenian jury. Why? He lived almost 2,500 years ago, and yet the questions he raised and the controversies he generated are disputed as heatedly now as they were then. Lehmann weaves into Socrates’s story the details of daily life and politics, historical context, and scenes from the comic stage that bring passages from Plato’s dialogues to life. The resultinló