Embracing Hope: On Freedom, Responsibility & the Meaning of Life

by Viktor E. Frankl Narrated by Steve West

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Hope can be hard to find, but this book makes the universal search much easier. Accessible and concise, it's an actionable guide to finding that elusive optimism.

A highly anticipated, rediscovered collection from Viktor Frankl, published for the first time in the United States, exploring freedom, responsibility, and how we can draw meaning from the temporary nature of our lives

From the bestselling author of Man's Search for Meaning, which has sold over 18 million copies

The Library of Congress lists Man's Search for Meaning as one of the ten most influential books in history. Scientists and artists, politicians and celebrities regularly cite Frankl as one of the most important authors every person should read. Now, there is another book for his devoted fans to add to their collections.

Published here for the first time in the United States, Embracing Hope continues Frankl's enduring life's work and provides even more lessons for those searching for meaning and purpose. It's made up of four distinct pieces from Frankl on different themes - all uniting around the idea that we should remain open to life even when we have been subjected to appalling injustice, and even when we are faced with our own mortality and the brief nature of our lives. At a time of global suffering where so many are searching for hope and meaning, Frankl's work seems more relevant and more important than ever.

Whether you're a devoted follower of Frankl's work or a newcomer seeking to enrich your understanding of life's purpose, this book promises a captivating journey that will leave you pondering its teachings long after you've turned the final page.

Just imagine what would happen, what life would look like, if there were no death. Imagine what it would be like if you could postpone anything and everything, if you could put it off for eternity. You wouldn't have to do anything today or tomorrow. Everything could just as easily be done next week, next month, next year, in a decade, in 100 or 1,000 years. Only in the face of death, only under pressure from the finiteness, the temporal limitation of human existence, is there any point in going about our business, and not only in going about our business, but in experiencing life, and not only in experiencing life but also in loving someone, and even in enduring and surviving something that is inflicted on us.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

06/17/2024

The late Viennese psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor applies his humanistic psychology to the horrors of the Holocaust and modern anomie in this resonant collection of lectures and articles. In a lecture from December 1946, Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning) outlines the roots of a modern worldview that relieves people of “individual responsibility,” against which he asserts the individual’s power to create meaning, even in the hellish confines of concentration camps. Three other pieces—a 1955 article in an Austrian medical journal, a 1977 interview from a Canadian TV program, and a 1984 lecture—delve deeper into these themes and his “logotherapy,” a “meaning-centered approach to mental health” that calls for personal growth through purposeful work, love, and the transcendence of suffering. To illustrate the latter, Frankl provides moving case studies of people who surmounted personal trials, including a young man paralyzed below the neck who took psychology courses—using a stick clenched in his teeth to type—and became a counselor. Though there’s a noticeable lack of rigor in Frankl’s theorizing, the message is moving and his lyrical prose will stick in readers’ minds (“Life is a constant process of dying, the continuous withering away of something... a constant farewell”). It’s an inspiring introduction to Frankl’s thinking. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

Decades-old writing that remains timely . . . Comforting and necessary.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The message is moving and his lyrical prose will stick in readers’ minds. It’s an inspiring introduction to Frankl’s thinking.”
—Publishers Weekly

“For those unfamiliar with his work, Embracing Hope offers a brief but compelling collection of two lectures, an interview, and an article that capture the central premises and concerns of his work. . . . Like all good thinkers, he makes his readers think and challenges them to provide better answers to the questions he sees our world asking.”
—World

Kirkus Reviews

2024-06-08
A celebrated psychotherapist and philosopher offers insight into why humanity must persevere in its quest to find meaning in everyday life.

Frankl, the author of international bestsellerMan’s Search for Meaning, has long been considered one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. Yet not all of his work has been translated or made available to wider reading audiences. The four pieces that comprise this collection—three essays and one interview with the author on Canadian TV—were written or transcribed between 1946 and 1984; all deal with the inevitability of human suffering and eternal struggle to find hope and peace. In the opening essay, the author reflects on the transience of human life and the responsibility of each individual to not only “recognize opportunities for meaning” but also fulfill them despite any suffering that person may be experiencing. Turning tragedy into triumph and suffering into an achievement mitigates transience, opening the door to meaning, and all depends on individual choice because, as Frankl explains in the piece that follows, meaning “can be found irrespective of the environmental situation.” In the third essay, the author suggests that such modern-day ills as fanaticism and collectivist thinking are really signifiers of the existential emptiness that arises from feelings of purposelessness. The way human beings can move past that emptiness is by resisting the temptation to do nothing and—and, as Frankl discusses in the last essay—taking “responsibility (for choices and actions) in the face of transience” and suffering. These essays are without a doubt the products of the difficult, often alienating century in which they were written, but the wisdom—and, perhaps more importantly, hope—they offer during a time of competing global emergencies and the threat of human extinction is both comforting and necessary.

Decades-old writing that remains timely.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159181602
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	08/20/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	962,249

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