In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "Charming and brilliant." --Times Literary Supplement "Provocative, stimulating, wise―the book that our success-obsessed age needs to read."―Tom Holland "Bradatan, a philosopher, writes with elegance and wit, his every thought and sentence slipping smoothly into the next...I was absorbed by Bradatan's book even--or especially--when I felt uncomfortable with its implications." --Jennifer Szalai, New York Times "Bradatan wears his erudition lightly. He is a pleasure to read, and his prose conveys a happy resilience in the face of life's inevitable contradictions. His lessons in humility remind us that the pursuit of success is often motivated by the dread of failure--and that our attempts to create things are often driven by an avoidance of our mortality." --Michael S. Roth, Washington Post "Bradatan writes with the same daring, the same interpretive anger that made his subjects notorious in their own day for choosing failure over what their