Well @Kendel might remember when I announced my intention to take a look at the book The Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf. But it didn’t take long for me to decide it wasn’t for me. Don’t think I started with the prologue that time, more eager to hear about particular historical figures of that time period. Eager for a story with compelling characters. Had I started here instead my interest would have fixated on the perspective of the author as it has now. A sample:
From the prologue of Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wolf, pp 2-4
Every single day of my life. I write. I tell stories. I try to make sense of the past so that I can learn something about the present. I am lucky. Incredibly lucky. It could have all gone horribly wrong. But it didn’t. Until now, I have had the privilege of having lived my life. I’m also very aware. That it might not always remain like this.
There have been times when my ferocious appetite for independence became egotistical. I’m sure my daughter would have preferred not to move as frequently as we did. But despite these upheavals, she turned out to be a beautiful human being. And I became an adult as I grew up with her. That little girl grounded me and anchored my determination to be free into something bigger: to be a good person. She enabled me to find a balance between being free spirited and being responsible.
We live in a world in which we tiptoe along a thin line between free will and selfishness, between self-determination and narcissism, between empathy and righteousness. Underpinning everything are two crucial questions: Who am I as an individual? And who am I as a member of a group and society? …
For most of my adult life, I have been tryin to understand why we are who we are. This is the reason why I write history books. In my previous books, I have looked at the relationship between humankind and nature in order to understand why we’ve destroyed so much of our magnificent blue planet. But I realize that it is not enough to look at the connections between us and nature. The first step is to look at us as individuals - when did we begin to be as selfish as we are today? At what point did we expect to have the right to determine our own lives? When did we think it was our right to take what we wanted? Where did this - us, you, me or our collective behavior - all come from? When did we first ask the question, how can I be free?