A book of big and bold ideas, Humanly Possible is humane in approach and, more important, readable and worth reading, whether you agree with it or not ... Ms. Bakewell is wide-ranging, witty and compassionate.
[Bakewell] manages to wrangle seven centuries of humanist thought into a brisk narrative, resisting the traps of windy abstraction and glib oversimplification. But covering such enormous terrain means that Humanly Possible doesn’t quite have the bracing focus of her earlier work ... There is a beauty to this, even if it doesn’t quite answer the question of how to rein in all the godlike powers we have already unleashed.
At its core a tenderhearted story about the least tender of experiences: that of refugee children, separated from their parents and extended family, forced to grow up on their own in a foreign country ... Pin does an excellent job of portraying the loneliness and longing for family that the children experience ... Pin's prose is quietly powerful, her voice assured, her love for this fictional family apparent on every page.
Exhilarating ... Looking for saints and heroes is not the humanist way, but Bakewell finishes this bracing book by urging us to draw inspiration from these earlier men and women as we try hard to live bravely and humanly in what sometimes seems like an aridly abstract and loveless world.
Like Bakewell’s previous two books, Humanly Possible skilfully combines philosophy, history and biography. She is scholarly yet accessible, and portrays people and ideas with vitality and without anachronism, making them affecting and alive.
Her book doesn't feel terribly urgent ... Bakewell’s writing inspires immense pleasure. She is a warm, engaging, and clear explicator of dense ideas ... What makes these books so enjoyable is that Bakewell writes with the gusto of an enthusiast. But her history of humanism suffers from this tendency ... Without a pithy definition or clear doctrine, she can manage only to narrow humanism down to three characteristics: freethinking, hope, and inquiry ... Her writing goes down easy. But she tends to brush past the shortcomings of her subjects ... She seems conspicuously reluctant to engage in the culture wars roiling intellectual life and global politics, which is strange, because her book keeps returning to themes at the core of the conflicts.
Her topic is humanism, and she’s given us a chatty, discursive survey of way more than the 'seven hundred years' of 'freethinking, inquiry and hope' that her subtitle promises ... Although she mostly steers clear of contemporary politics, it’s impossible to read this book without concluding that Bakewell laments the fashionable obsession with individual identities (racial, national, religious, sexual) at the expense of all that humans share ... At times, I was troubled by the utopianism running through this work, a preference for monks and eschatological dreamers over people who make an actual difference ... Bakewell’s treatment of the contemporary humanist movement is cursory and inadequate. There is no mention of the famous atheists of the last century ... Humanly Possible is a terrific invitation to argument, to conversation, to all the fun people make together, on their own.
Sarah Bakewell agrees that humanism is hard to pin down, but she devotes her new book to a dazzling effort to do just that ... Bakewell gives us an account not of humanism but instead of humanists ... Inevitably, Bakewell’s portraits miss a feature here and there that another portraitist might have captured ... Nevertheless, Bakewell gets the big picture right.
Erudite and accessible, Bakewell’s survey pulls together diverse historical threads without sacrificing the up-close details that give this work its spark. Even those who already consider themselves humanists will be enlightened.
