Customer Reviews

Everything Has Two Handles: The Stoic's Guide to the Art of Living

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Dr. Pies has accomplished something quite wonderful in "Everything Has Two Handles": he has knitted together ancient wisdom drawn from many traditions - Western and Eastern - and created a text that speaks familiarly and comfortingly to our times. The loom on which he weaves his fabric has two main supports: the teachings of the ancient Stoics and the author's own voice, which is at once calm, reassuring, sensible and also funny. Pies creates in this book a "meeting place" of voices, a text that illustrates the very virtues it enjoins us to practice (and he does mean practice, as in the old joke: "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"). Here voices of the classical Stoics (prominently Marcus Aurelius and Seneca) mix happily with those of our American contemporaries (people dealing with the trials of making a living, enduring sickness and coping with the debility and death of loved ones); the sounds of Buddhist sages, Talmudic scholars and mediaeval Christians blend to form a chorus. And indeed it is a chorus - not a hodge-podge or a replay of the lethal competition of rival truth-claims that has made a charnel house of history. And how is this possible? Because Pies - with a light and humorous touch - shows us how alike these voices really are, how they do indeed speak shared truths in their different idioms. Both the author's voice and the teachings of the Stoics urge on us a kind of modesty about ourselves, a self-discipline that insists that we have an ethical obligation to try to do our best yet also acknowledges that we will learn largely from our failures. Pies has given us a book that is in the best sense "counter-cultural"; his work goes thoroughly against the grain of the mass culture of our times, which seeks happiness in "getting and spending" and which treats any notion of limits as a kind of "unspeakable" heresy (so much so that - as Pies points out - we can barely force ourselves to say of someone that he or she has "died," preferring euphemisms to simple truth). Yet Pies has that rarest of touches - the ability to help us see the foolishness of our ways without alienating us; listening to his reassuring voice - and to the magnificent chorus he has recruited - we are happy to learn.
I strongly recommend this book as a practical guide to the perplexities of life (and, yes, Maimonides is to be found in these pages as well), as an antidote to "what ails us" in the modern world, and as a thoroughly enjoyable read!

Everything Has Two Handles could become an obligatory reading for everybody 15 year-old and older. It has a magical communality and you could easily find yourself in some of the stories. I felt that it made me think and reflect while feeling that something was challenging me. I will read it again and again to learn more from this superb book.

This book is short and very easy to read- you don't need any formal philosophy education to understand or benefit from it. I found the book to be extremely helpful-- a real life changer. I have applied much of what i learned and found it to lower my daily stress level. I highly recommend it!

I have never before written a review on Amazon, but this little book is truly remarkable. Stoicism has gotten an unfair reputation in the modern world for being a system that represses all feelings to the detriment of the practitioner. In fact Stoicism is a much more humane and realistic system, as Dr. Ronald Pies illustrates in a clear and concise manner. Upon receiving this book, I read it once through and then immediately again more carefully, highlighting points with a highlighter.

Quotes from Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and others demonstrate wisdom about human strengths and shortcomings that has transcended centuries. Although another reader complained about the references to Jewish philosophers, I very much enjoyed Pies including their words, especially when they provided a welcome contrast to the Stoics' views on when and how anger can be appropriately expressed. Personally, I think Pies would have been remiss if he had not included Jewish insight. Jewish philosophy reflects knowledge gained by surviving and thriving despite a long history of persecution. To be fair, Pies also includes several references to other religions, most notably referring to Buddhist wisdom at several points. That said, I highly recommend Everything has Two Handles as a primer that allows the reader to understand how Stoicism can be applied to the life of a modern reader.

Buying this book I thought I was getting a book condensing the wisdom of the Stoics, especially Marcus Aurelius. What I got was equal parts from Stoicism and Jewish philosophers, maybe even more of the latter. I'm not sure if the author's intent was to show that the Jewish tradition has carried the flame for the Stoics, if he thinks they independently arrived at the same conclusions, or what. But if I wanted a book on Jewish philosophy I'd go out and get one.