PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMr. Setiya’s path avoids the easy answers. He does not say that everything happens for a reason (it does not) or that virtue secures a good life (it might not) and certainly not that we can know the cosmos is guided by a loving, providential hand (we can not). Rather, the consolation he provides is \'a handbook of hardships,\' a guide to navigating through life’s challenges. His analysis combines philosophical arguments and personal reflections on his own experience. He offers this in the hope that it will help readers better understand their own suffering and perhaps ease the weight of it. The result is a deeply personal exploration of six forms of human suffering—infirmity, loneliness, grief, failure, injustice and absurdity—with a final reflection on the one virtue he offers as necessary to navigate them all: hope ... One limitation of the book is that Mr. Setiya’s own life hasn’t been too hard. Unlike many philosophers before him, he’s never experienced the atrocities of war, been unjustly imprisoned, found himself caught up in political intrigues, buried a child, lived under the boot of a wicked tyrant, and so on. Rather, his hardships will be familiar to the members of his social class: He was a lonely but brainy kid; as a teenager he was unceremoniously dumped by a girlfriend; he suffers chronic but manageable pain; older loved ones have become sick or have died; and he’s had a midlife crisis. There is no high drama here, which may either exasperate readers or endear him to them ... His use of the great philosophers is decontextualized and somewhat scattershot; it often consists of not much more than a quotation or summary. The inevitable result is a loss of depth and, in some cases, caricatures of thinkers who surely deserve better treatment ... Perhaps that is no matter, since Mr. Setiya’s aim is to help his readers practice philosophy rather than to teach them the history of ideas. The ultimate test of the book, then, is whether it consoles. On this matter I think we’re likely to run up against the inevitable tensions between consolation and inspiration. The consolation Mr. Setiya offers is that, while life is hard, we can still live well, because living well isn’t a terribly demanding standard ... I confess that I find this deeply puzzling. Given the amount of injustice Mr. Setiya thinks exists, and given that he thinks fighting injustice is the only route to a meaningful life, you might expect that he would argue for heroic efforts and sacrifices. But we needn’t be heroes or saints in this vale of tears, he tells us. We can navigate the hardships of our lives without too much sacrifice and without beating ourselves up too much about what more we might have done ... While there is much I disagree with, I enjoyed Mr. Setiya’s book and hope it will find success. Any attempt by a philosopher to help us live well—not in spite of human suffering but in full acknowledgment of it—is a welcome respite from so many too-tidy philosophical theories of human well being. A more honest and humane treatment is long overdue, and even if they are not ultimately consoled, readers will surely find themselves more connected to their own humanity from reading and reflecting on this book.