Informative Text with a Misleading Title.

Donald J. Robertson's How to Think Like Socrates: Ancient Philosophy as a Way of Life in the Modern World, is a meticulously researched, comprehensive introduction to the life of the famed philosopher. The only problem is that the book's title may be something of an overstatement. The book is marketed and packaged as a How-To (it's even in the title) on how to apply Socratic principles to life in the hustle and bustle of the 21st century, and while there are absolutely passages about that in the book, I would say they make up less than a quarter of the entire volume, probably even less.

A better title might have been, "The Life and Times of Socrates," for the majority of the book is a deep dive into the socio-political situation of Athens during Socrates's lifetime, paying special attention to the Peloponnesian War. Interspersed throughout the historical context are details about Socrates's life, pieced together from what little we actually know about the man, and then the passages on applying philosophy to modern life, from which the book gets its title.

The intense reliance on history likely serves two purposes: one, details about Socrates are limited, and two, author Donald Robertson seems to be laying out the events in Socrates's life and world that ultimately led to his execution for "corrupting the youth." While never becoming partisan, he does point to our own political divides throughout the book, and I couldn't help but think of some of our own situations today.

The passages with the philosophy strategies, often correlated to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques (Robertson proposes that Socrates was ahead of his time in the eventual development of CBT centuries before it was created), are simple but helpful suggestions and strategies to deal with issues such as anger and weighing the consequences of our actions, but they are a couple of pages at a time at the most before getting back to this or that battle in Ancient Greece. This wasn't a problem for me, because I am a history buff, especially for Greco-Roman history, but readers who wanted more of a self-help book won't get it here (which Robertson tells you in his introduction).

Most readers will likely learn something here, but may not come away with a lot to put in their toolbox in their effort to become latter-day philosophers.