Robert Zaretsky
Author of A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning
About the Author
Robert Zaretsky is an associate professor in the Honors College and Department of Modern and Classical Languages at the University of Houston.
Works by Robert Zaretsky
The Philosophers' Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding (2009) 90 copies, 1 review
Associated Works
Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria (1999) — Translator, some editions — 13 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1955-06
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Education
- University of Virginia (PhD|History)
University of Vermont (MA|History)
McGill University (BA|Philosophy) - Occupations
- university professor
historian - Organizations
- University of Houston
New York Times
Foreign Policy
Chronicle of Higher Education
Los Angeles Review of Books - Agent
- Marly Rusoff
- Short biography
- Robert Zaretsky is a literary biographer and historian of France. He is Professor of Humanities at the Honors College, University of Houston, and the author of many books, including A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning and Boswell’s Enlightenment. Zaretsky is the history editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, a regular columnist for The Forward, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Foreign Policy.
Members
Reviews
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 11
- Also by
- 2
- Members
- 366
- Popularity
- #65,730
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 11
- ISBNs
- 30
- Languages
- 2
Victories Never Last looks to the past to understand our present. Pandemics have riddled human history; the result of the growth of cities and trade which fostered the spread of disease. The numbers of lives claimed by plagues is startling–until we consider that one of of four Americans have contracted Covid-19, and without the medical advancements and health care we enjoy, for our ancestors that meant one out of four died.
Fear and disorder were byproducts of disease, breaking down social, political, and religious order. Thucydides described the Athenian plague as stripping “society to its bones, baring a world of naked self-interest and preservation�� Zaretsky shares.
Marcus Aurelius responded by writing his Meditations, his personal journal to aid his adherence to his Stoic philosophy.
Montaigne was still mayor of Bordeaux when the Bubonic Plague struck, taking nearly half the population. Retiring to a life of contemplation to write his essays, he concluded that “It is not what will be or what has been that counts, but our being at this moment that we should embrace.”
In his A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe chronicled the Great Plague in 1665 London.
Albert Camus responded to the ‘brown plague’ of the Nazis; he noted that the plague in his novel has both “a social and metaphysical sense.”
Zaretsky compares Mary Wollstonecraft’s’ novel of plague The Last Man and Camus’ last, unfinished novel The First Man.
Throughout the book, Zaretsky relates his experiences in the nursing home and his own struggles with mortality. We are all frail and flawed human beings, he ends, all both the first and last of women and men.
Over these last years, many have turned to the past to help understand the present. These histories sadly show that the divisiveness which has upended our social welfare under Covid-19 is not new. These writers offer philosophies that can help us cope with our awareness of mortality.
I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.… (more)