The immediate Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and New York Times bestseller!
Pro athletes, CEOs, politicians, and business owners were enthralled with Ryan Holiday's best-selling trilogy, The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego is the Enemy, and Stillness is the Key, which also introduced stoicism to millions of readers. Now, Holiday examines the most fundamental virtue of them in the first volume of a fascinating new series on the cardinal virtues of ancient philosophy: courage.
Fear is a problem for almost all spiritual traditions, religions, philosophies, and individuals. In the Bible, the most often repeated phrase is "Be not afraid." The Greeks talked of fright, panic, and phobos. The Stoics held that while fear is normal, it cannot control you. Therefore, courage is the capacity to overcome fear in order to act morally, urgently, and truthfully. Thus, it shares a central place with temperance, justice, and knowledge in the writings of Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, and C.S. Lewis.
Ryan Holiday deconstructs fear as an expression of cowardice, courage as an expression of bravery, and heroism as an expression of valor in his book Courage Is Calling. Holiday demonstrates how to overcome fear and embody courage in daily life via captivating tales of notable historical and modern figures, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Florence Nightingale, and Charles De Gaulle.
Additionally, you will delve deeply into the moral quandaries and valiant deeds of lesser-known, but no less significant, figures from both ancient and modern history, like Frank Serpico, a former detective from the New York City Police Department who exposed police corruption, Helvidius Priscus, a Roman senator who stood his ground against Emperor Vespasian even in the face of death, Frederick Douglass, and Nelly, a slave whose fierce resistance against her captors inspired his own crusade to end slavery.
We need courage now more than ever in a world where fear is pervasive, where individuals would sooner follow the crowd than take a stand against injustice, conform to society than take a chance on themselves, and ignore the harsh facts of contemporary life. Risk-takers and whistleblowers must have guts. Adventurers and activists, we need your courage. We need authors with the guts to tell it as it is, and leaders with the guts to listen.
We need you to enter the ring and engage in combat.